Re: Question
> It decided that you are no longer allowed to find articles that somebody doesn't like you seeing, it passed a law allowing references to those library documents to be censored.
No, it really didn't. The reference to the document can still be shown, but may not be returned as the result for a particular search term. As Andrew has pointed out, this is something Google already do for their own reasons. Their objection here is being asked to do it for someone else's reasons.
> Libraries everywhere should be reveiwing their cardex systems, and cataloging every entry in great detail lest someone requests a takedown notice for an index card.
This is ill-informed fantasy. Read the judgement.
"The Court observes, furthermore, that this information potentially concerns a vast number of aspects of his private life and that, without the search engine, the information could not have been interconnected or could have been only with great difficulty."
Such as by going to a number of libraries and trawling through their indexes. Note that a library's news archive will typically not be arranged by the name of every person mentioned in every article; it's more likely to be by date and subject and publication. What the court are doing is recognising the old-fashioned barrier of difficulty: that there is a relationship between how difficult something is to find out and how much effort people are willing to put into finding it out, and that Google are erasing that relationship by making certain things too easy. That makes sense: with progress, we get pros and cons. So there is no problem at all with deciding to look into the financial history of John Q Smith and going and trawling through bunkruptcy records and news archives in libraries and so on: if someone wants to find that particular bit of information, they still can. What has been stopped is asking the much vaguer question of "What about this John Q Smith, then, eh?" and having Google immediately wave a big flag in your face with "BANKRUPTCY" written on it.
"Furthermore, the effect of the interference with the person’s rights is heightened on account of the important role played by the internet and search engines in modern society, which render the information contained in such lists of results ubiquitous."
Which clearly and obviously doesn't apply to a library's index.
> This is exactly the kind of censorship western nations have been screaming about in China.
Seriously? You're claiming that the problem with oppressive totalitarian Communist dictatorships is that they insist on removing records of people's past transgressions, giving them a clean slate? Are you on crack?