Right to be forgotten vs duty to remember

In the wake of the European Court of Justice’s decision to create a “right to be forgotten” by Google’s search engine the National Post has been running a series of article’s about the decision’s meaning and effects. They kindly asked me to contribute and my piece asks the question, ‘if there is a duty that corresponds to every right, what is the duty that corresponds to the right to be forgotten?’ The answer must be that we have a duty to forget. But we have no such duty — au contraire! It is our duty to remember and to defend the integrity of the historical record.