The Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) has upheld the appeal of Antonello Venditti against Rai (the national public broadcasting company of Italy) on the issue of the right to be forgotten. Rai was accused of having aired, after five years of its first emission, and during the transmission of the program “La vita in diretta”, a video where the singer peremptorily refused an interview, which marks him as one of the grumpiest and unpleasant characters of the moment. According to the Supreme Court, neither the freedom of the press nor the fame of Antonello Venditti, can justify the re-broadcast of the video.
The right to be forgotten is a concept which, in the last years, and with the propagation of the new media, has been brought back to the limelight and is now regulated in Italy by the Privacy Code and the subsequent laws. The Supreme Court has described it as the “the rightful interest of every person to not remain indefinitely exposed to further damages brought to their honor and to their reputation by the repeated publication of a news item that was legitimately divulged in the past”. However, there are different interpretations according to the case and the media employed. It is, in its essence, the right of an individual to not be remembered for past actions. After a certain period of time, some news no longer has relevance in the present and cannot be considered of public interest. For this reason, any individual can request the suppression and the update of facts which damaged him/her in the past and which could continue to distort his/her public image. This issue might conflict with the rights of information and news, but the passing of times implies that the right to be forgotten shall prevail over the other two rights.
In this case in particular, according to the Supreme Court, Antonello Venditti has all the rights to request for damages made by Rai, since the video that was re-broadcasted after five years of its first emission is no longer of current interest and it harms his public image.
