인터넷상 인격권 침해와 시간의 경과 - 유럽연합에서의 논의를 중심으로 -

Abstract

News articles, which were legitimate when printed, may be illegitimate as time went by. In an analog age, itis not required to re-evaluate out of date articles’ legitimacy as old articles have lost interest among currentpeople. Nowadays, due to internet searching engines and digital data bases, old news articles are consumed justas new ones. It means that persons, whose right to personality were invaded at some previous time by newsarticles, are prone to be hurt perpetually by the same news articles repeatedly shown on the internet. A newprivacy right to delete old news articles is being introduced to cope with this new problem in Europeancountries. The purpose of this paper is to assess the new right as an an effective but the least dangerous meanto protect the people from infringement of right to personality. The main findings are as follows: First, it is required to block flows of old articles, namely personal data onthe internet when those are repeatedly infringing data subjects’ right to personality even though they werelegitimate in old days. Second, deleting old articles is not always necessary to protect data subjects’ right to personality. The rightshould be outcome of balancing two fundamental rights: data subjects’ right to privacy and the public’s right toknow. Third, the legal grounds for the right to delete can be found at current data protection law. On May 13,2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union opened door for the right to be forgotten in Google case. The Court ruling is based on the 1995 Data Protection Directive while, in many advocates’ opinion, theDirective is fall short of the right to be forgotten. Forth, it is online service providers such as search engines that are mainly responsible for spreading harmfulinformation. It should be noted that one effective way of harmonizing two conflicting fundamental rights is torequest deletion not to publishers of original articles, but to online service providers. Fifth, to prevent private censorship by online service provides, precise guidelines are required in decidingwhether to delete or remove linking to old articles.