IT and politics

Yesterday, the European Parliament voted in favour of the infamous “link tax” and to build more firewalls on the Internet, obsessed with censoring any material that might infringe on copyright. In so doing, perfectly legal uploads would most certainly become collateral damage of the nearsighted robots that are supposed to enforce this.

The EU is quick to point out that this will not affect “small” companies, in practice meaning ones with fewer than 50 employees. That is hardly any comfort, and WordPress.com for instance has 779 employees at the time of writing this. Should everyone with a blog now start looking over their shoulders?

Mozilla (the folks behind Firefox) has more details on the situation before the vote, and where we are after the vote.

As for Sweden, here’s how the voting went: (Socialdemokraterna form the current government here, together with Miljöpartiet)

For:

Against:

Abstentions: none.

Appears not to have been present:

Sources:

• Press release from the European Parliament
• EU definition of company sizes
• List of Swedish MEPs
• About WordPress.com etc.
• Copy of voting list from the European Parliament: euparl-copyright-votes-sep-2018.pdf (the relevant votes are on page 38 and 39)