Europe's collision course with copyright censorship: where we stand today

I've just published a comprehensive explainer on Medium about the EU's new Copyright Directive, which was sabotaged at the last minute, when MEP Axel Voss snuck in the long-discredited ideas of automatically censoring anything a bot thinks infringes copyright and banning unpaid links to news articles.

After a million Europeans signed a petition calling for a debate on the new proposals, a divided opposition failed to kill them. But hope is not lost: the new Italian government has changed position on the proposals and now the opposition constitutes a potential "blocking minority" that could kill the whole thing -- provided they could work together.

The new Directive is now in the triloguesclosed-door negotiations between the E.U.s Parliament and individual national governments. Normally, these are a formality that takes place out of public view. However, the current trilogue is both more contested and more public than any in the E.U.s history.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that Europeans are entitled to know what happens in these trilogue negotiations, and German Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda has pledged to publish the negotiating documents (and shes kept her word).

Whats more, the trilogues coincide with political changes in Italy, and the Italian government has withdrawn its support for Articles 11 and 13. This brings the proportion of Europeans who oppose these articles past the critical threshold of 35%, a theoretical blocking minority that could scuttle the entire proposal (assuming they can avoid the trap the opposition fell into last time: agreeing that these rules arent appropriate but disagreeing on what to do about it).