When a work has gone orphan, it means that it is effectively lost until the copyright monopoly expires, 70 years after the creator’s death. You can only hope that somebody has kept a copy illegally and copied it across new forms of storage media as they go in and out of fashion as the decades come and go, or it will be lost forever.

The vote in committee on March 1 was supposed to end that (or, more technically, recommend a course of ending that to the European Parliament as a whole). However, the copyright industry lobby won key points in the voting procedure with 14 votes against reform and 12 in favor of it, according to the just-published protocol.

There’s a problem with this. There are 24 seats in the committee, and one group (non-inscrits) was absent, lacking deputies to fill that person’s vote. So, there should have been 23 votes at the most. But we just counted 12 votes for reform and 14 against. That’s 26.