If you tried to look something up on Wikipedia on Wednesday (18th Jan) you would have been unlucky as the site had closed its English language version for 24 hours. Instead of a database of more than 3.8 million articles, visitors were greeted with an open letter encouraging them to contact Congress in protest. So what was it all about?

Well it would seem that there are two bills being considered by the US legislature, the House of Representatives is considering the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) is the parallel bill being considered by the Senate. The proposed legislation is designed to tackle online piracy, with particular emphasis on illegal copies of films and other forms of media hosted on foreign servers. The bills propose that anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months should face up to five years in jail.

Everyone will have their own opinions about this of course, but do you really need Wikipedia which has tons of information and I do use it but, I do not understand how this protest will achieve anything. It has just proved to me how little I need Wikipedia and how much info is available on other sites. It is always necessary to check what it says against other sites, anyway, because it is free and anyone can say anything on it so there is no guaranteed accuracy.

Supporters of the bills include television networks, music publishers, movie industry bodies, book publishers and manufacturers. Critics include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn, AOL and Zynga.