Musician: By law, bad review must be removed from Internet

File photo of a piano. (AP Photo/The Detroit News, Max Ortiz, File)

Ah, the life of a high-flying soloist: Tour the world, wine and dine with musical greats ... and get an occasional bad review. Croatian pianist Dejan Lazic doesn't much like the last part, so he's asked the Washington Post to remove an online review under the European Union's "right to be forgotten" ruling, the Post reports.

"To wish for such an article to be removed from the internet has absolutely nothing to do with censorship or with closing down our access to information," Lazic writes the paper in an email.

He says it's all about crafting his personal image, or what he calls "the truth." The issue: Anyone Googling his name has seen the 2010 review, headlined "Sparks but no flame," at the top of the list.

Does he have a leg to stand on? The Post notes that the "right to be forgotten" ruling in May allows individuals to have "inadequate, irrelevant, or ... excessive" links removed from search engine results.

And Google has agreed in more than 53% of cases, removing, for example, an article about a soccer referee who fibbed about a penalty kick and a report on an airline accused of racism from its search results, the Guardian reports.

But the ruling only applies to search engines and the EU; Lazic is asking a newspaper in the US to remove the offending article. What's more, the review by Anne Midgette is tepid, not bad, mixing praise of his "prodigious gifts" with criticism of that evening's musical results.

As Slipped Disc puts it, Lazic may "have earned the right to be forgotten until he grows a thicker skin and receives better advice." (Click for more on the "right to be forgotten.")

This article originally appeared on Newser: Musician: By Law, Bad Review Must Be Pulled