And the pianist is not going anywhere, he wrote a letter to the wrong organization (and now he's thrown under the bus). He can only scrub results on the European Google.
Moreover the concept of free speech itself has been high-jacked by big money for bullshit (the nickname for citizen united), so I don't see how it's protecting anyone from anything, it's part of the game. Free speech was just a protection of political ideas against the government and it's mostly dead in the days of terrorism law.
When that right collides with the publication of information the court needs to weigh how to best protect public interest.
In this case the court decided that privacy rights for information that is not in itself in the public interest outweighs the interest of making the information easily searchable.
I argue that an act that is reported in a newspaper does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and as a result that the right to be forgotten is distinct from the right to privacy.
More particularly, the concept of public interest is static neither in time nor is it equal across all citizens, but rights are by definition equal across all citizens. A rule that always applies except for when it doesn't is really just a venue for arbitrary decisionmaking.
It's a peculiarity of the current age that we can find out so much about people so easily, that trivialities are preserved in photographic quality, and that these records are preserved publicly for extended periods of time.
I think the "right to be forgotten" has always implicitly existed and that we accidentally erased it before we realized what we were doing, and only now are seeing a backlash as the effects of that choice are being felt.
What's worse is that back then people had difficulty discovering rumors about themselves. At least today, we can do vanity searches.
No one is saying that people don't have a right to their memories. Even communities have the right to remember things collectively. But imagine if you couldn't get a job in your small town because everyone whispered about you being a child molester or something. You couldn't get housing. No one would talk to you. You had to beg for food. My example is a bit extreme but it illustrates the example well because some of these things happen on a massive scale to people whose potential employers web search them.