> How can you own something that is inside my head?
If I put it there, I own it, and I should be able to destroy all proof that it's not purely a fabrication of your imagination. (Sure, you can still know it and use it to guide your decision, but it shouldn't be legally valid any more, and there should be no way for you to convince others it's true.) Yeah, obviously if it's in the heads of other people too, it would be more accounts in favor of that information being authentic, increasing the probability that I am lying about that in a legal situation. But key thing would be that it's a probability. I can destroy the certainty. That could swing depending on context, maybe I'm more trustworthy than the group of people arguing for the authenticity of that piece of information.
Obviously there's great deal of criminal activities that can be protected by going too far with this, so it's a question of "tweaking the dial" until we get the right amount of informational "light" and "darkness". As Jung said, there are some who need light, and some who thrive in the shadows...
There's two problems. First, there's a basic argument from the outside that you're fucking with historicity for no good reason other than that you think that you're more important than humanity.
Second, from the inside, this simply isn't how memes work. Memes are designed to propagate and survive on their own. If your ideas are at all good or interesting to society, and they manage to become memetic, then you have zero recourse, just as if you were Patient Zero for some new plague. You shared it, and unsharing is impossible, regardless of how moral you might believe unsharing to be.
Seriously, take some time and think about it: How many of your ideas and concepts are actually original to you? Almost none of them, right? And if you're honest with yourself, pretty much every concept seem inextricably linked to others. Really, what matters is the structure between ideas, and that can't be shared, since it's private to each person's mind.
Anyway, if this doesn't sway you, I'm okay with it; you're purely a fabrication of my imagination.
> and I should be able to destroy all proof that it's not purely a fabrication of your imagination.
But this is even more problematic. What if you don't own the thing being used as proof? Do you get to destroy it just because it could be used to incriminate you?
For example, if I take a photograph of a public non-performative event, I legally own the copyright on that photograph. The photograph itself is treated like a creative expression. So should you be able to destroy my photograph? Because the law says I own that, not you.
With Right to Be Forgotten, you might be able to have that photograph delisted from Google images, assuming you had gone through a lengthy court process based on multiple determinations of how public the information was and how harmful it was to you. But you can't come over to my house and make me delete it.
If I go onto a forum later and say, "yeah, I can prove this thing happened; here's a photograph", I haven't done anything illegal. Do you think that should be illegal? I feel like at the point where we're talking about destroying physical evidence of something, maybe this is going a little bit too far?
If I put it there, I own it, and I should be able to destroy all proof that it's not purely a fabrication of your imagination. (Sure, you can still know it and use it to guide your decision, but it shouldn't be legally valid any more, and there should be no way for you to convince others it's true.) Yeah, obviously if it's in the heads of other people too, it would be more accounts in favor of that information being authentic, increasing the probability that I am lying about that in a legal situation. But key thing would be that it's a probability. I can destroy the certainty. That could swing depending on context, maybe I'm more trustworthy than the group of people arguing for the authenticity of that piece of information.
Obviously there's great deal of criminal activities that can be protected by going too far with this, so it's a question of "tweaking the dial" until we get the right amount of informational "light" and "darkness". As Jung said, there are some who need light, and some who thrive in the shadows...