Ever since the European court ordered Google to delist a 16-year-old article about a bankruptcy, web watchers have wondered how the ‘right to be forgotten’ would evolve.

Mario Costeja González’s ‘Data and Goliath’ victory in 2014 in Spain has meant that human concepts of fairness are now applied to Google Search, which is subject to European data protection laws.

But there are now worrying new signs from Europe that the right is being applied directly against news websites and not just search engines.

The highest court in Italy recently upheld a ruling that, after a period of two years, an article in an online news archive had expired, “just like milk, yoghurt or a pint of ice-cream”.

This is a significant departure from previous applications of the right, which have always distinguished between delisting Google search results and removing content at source. Unlike previous courts, the Roman court has blamed the source, not the messenger.

The news website in question, ‘Primadanoi’ (‘The First Among Us’), a small website in Abruzzo, is outraged and has re-christened the ‘right to be forgotten’ (‘il diritto d’oblio’ in Italian), ‘the crime of oblivion’ (‘il delitto d’oblio’). Having had a sell-by date applied to its journalism, Primadanoi, is indeed now ‘The First Among Us’, but not in the way it would like.

This latest story begins on 23 March 2006 when Primadanoi published an article about a criminal case involving a restaurant owner. That is all we know about the article because the court has both redacted the names of the parties and omitted any reference to why the article was, in its view, ‘particularly sensitive’.

The owner didn’t like it, or more specifically, didn’t like it when, if people googled him or his restaurant, Google helpfully served up Primadanoi’s article along with adverts for his business. He demanded Primadanoi remove it.

When it refused, he issued legal proceedings, claiming reputational damage, privacy infringement and violation of his ‘right to be forgotten’ – even though the latter had never been applied against a news website.

Primadanoi relented and, six months after the request, removed the article. But the owner was not at all felice with the six-month delay (a long time in pasta sales?) and pursued the website to court in Ortona, demanding compensation.

The judge ordered Primadanoi to pay him and the restaurant €5,000 (£4,300) each, even confiscating the editor’s car as security. When Primadanoi appealed, the second court, at Chieti agreed that the newspaper’s right to freedom of expression had expired after two years, and punishment was apt for the six-month delay.

The website appealed to the supreme court of cassation in Rome, which said the complaint was ‘well-founded’ and the punishment fair.

In their ruling – which will cast a chill among journalists everywhere – the judges in Rome attached great importance to the availability of the archived article via Google Search, stressing that online material needs treating differently because, even if archived, it is “consultable simply by typing the name of the claimant and the name of the restaurant into the Google search engine”.

But, unlike their previous European counterparts, they failed to consider the alternative, as explained in the original Google Spain ruling, that: “publishers of websites have the option of indicating to operators of search engines, by means of particular exclusion protocols, such as ‘robot.txt’ or codes such as ‘noindex’ or ‘noarchive’, that they wish specific information published on their site to be wholly or partially excluded from search engines’ automatic indexes”.

This failure to distinguish between source and search engine caused Primadanoi to thunder that ‘Italian law does not understand technology or the internet’.

And indeed, the judgment does read like a proper legal mix-up, blending different areas of law (libel, privacy and data protection) into a novelty soup where separate causes of action with distinct defences and protections float about indistinguishably.

Consequently, in Italy at least, ‘the right to be forgotten’ now has a new meaning: the right to remove inconvenient journalism from archives after two years.

This surely cannot be right. If it was, everyone would demand deletions from news websites and online journalism would be decimated.

The law provides journalists with exemptions that are not available to other processors of data, such as robotic search engines. Otherwise newspapers would be empty and society starved of information.

In Italian law, this allows for the use of data “in the exercise of the profession of journalism and for the exclusive pursuit of the relevant goals”.

Primadanoi repeatedly argued this exemption in court. And given that the exemption applies to processing legal data and processing of sensitive data, you would have thought they had a point.

Not according to the supreme court, which basically ignored it. The reason they could do so, it seems, is a flaw in the protection offered to journalists by Italian law, once articles are no longer current.

As with English law, the Italian code dictates that ‘data must be kept in a form which allows identification for a period of time not beyond that which is necessary for the purposes for which they were collected.’

However, unlike in England, journalism is not exempted from this ‘time limit’, placing Italian journalists at a significant disadvantage to their English counterparts, who can, under the Data Protection Act, keep using and publishing the data if they have a reasonable belief that publication is in the public interest.

This leaves Italian editors vulnerable to arguments that their product has ‘now been published for long enough’ and must be taken down.

Indeed, the supreme court followed precisely this reasoning in concluding: “The time passed between the date it [the article] was first published and the date when its removal was requested, sufficed to satisfy the public interest as far as its right to be informed was concerned, and that therefore, at least from the date when the formal notice was received, that data could no longer be disclosed.”

Whether the ‘out of date’ stamp issued to a two-year-old article will now be applied elsewhere remains to be seen.

It will be a case of watch this URL – but if you’re reading from Italy, you’d better be quick, before it goes off.

Athalie Matthews is an in-house lawyer at Guardian News and Media