[Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people

[Lars Aronsson]

Tomasz Ganicz wrote:

> least in Poland at some legal risk. In Poland there is a law 
> that a person can always ask for removing his/her personal data 
> from any electronic database (except govermental ones).

There is a similar law in Sweden (Personuppgiftslagen, PUL), but 
it has an exception for the freedom of the press and similar 
journalistic purposes ("det journalistiska undantaget"), and this 
exception is always referred to for websites similar to Wikipedia.

The Norwegian law apparently has a similar exception, that also 
covers opinion pieces (opinionsdannende). The Danish law 
apparently refers directly to article 10 (freedom of expression) 
of the European Convention on Human Rights.

What you could do is to ask Polish journalists how they operate 
newspaper websites under this law, and how they (as guardians of 
the freedom of the press) would react if the Polish Wikipedia was 
censored in this way.  Perhaps they should write a newspaper 
article about how this musical artist tries to hide her real age.

This doesn't necessarily bring an answer to the question, but 
establishing a good link with journalists is always useful.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se