LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #46:

THE EU DECIDED TO NUKE THE INTERNET BECAUSE VOTING

“I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.”

~ Terry Pratchett

Yesterday, the European Parliament decided on copyright reform, and quite convincingly voted with 348 MEPs for, and 274 against the new directive, passing the directive without any changes.

Despite all protests and concerns about a “link tax” (Article 11) and Upload-Filters (Article 13), the parliament also voted down a motion that would allow for a continued debate and the filing of amendments. This second voting was much much closer, and lost by a technicality:

Members of the Sweden Democrats party were confused by the voting procedure and voted “no” instead of “yes”.

If they voted as they wanted to, the motion for continued debate of the directive would have been passed with 315 to 314 votes.

So, basically, we now have the worst copyright laws ever conceived on our tables because voting is difficult. I’ve been travelling a lot and basically was around things most of my waking time. As a result, my screen time was very limited, a digital detox by accident if you wish. I didn’t catch a lot interesting things (apart from the usual Facebook privacy hickup - this time exposing millions of passwords to the world, or some blockchain shenanigans going on; you know, business as usual).

So, the big news is the only news for this edition of Let’s be Fwends, I’m sure the next one will be longer. 💥