Intellectual Property and the Internet/Italian Wikipedia

The Italian Wikipedia is the Italian edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001 and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of the end of 2011 it had over 882,000 articles and more than 708,000 registered accounts. It is the 5th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles (after the English, German, French and Dutch editions).

2011 Mass Blanking Protest
From October 4 to October 6, 2011, following a decision adopted by volunteers of the Italian Wikipedia community, a knowledge blackout was in place. During this time, all of the site's articles were hidden and the website was blocked by its administrators, as a protest against paragraph 29 of the DDL intercettazioni (Wiretapping Bill) which was being debated at the time in the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian parliament.

The proposed bill would empower anyone who believes themselves to have been offended by the content of a web site, even if the content is true, to enforce publication of a reply in the same place and with equal prominence of the related content, within 48 hours and without any prior evaluation of the claim by a judge. If after 48 hours the reply hadn't been published, the person requesting the reply may eventually appeal to a civil court which would assess the request and evaluate the disputed content. The sanction would be a fine between 9,500 and 12,000 euros. Should the bill pass, it is thought likely to inflict severe limitations on the "horizontal" freedom of access and editing that is common to Wikimedia projects.

This was the first time that a Wikipedia had blanked all its content to protest. The Wikimedia Foundation officially supported the decision of the Italian Wikipedia by a statement released the same day. As of 5 October 2011 the manifesto, which replaced the Italian Wikipedia, had been viewed approximately 8 million times. On October 6, 2011, the website content was restored, with a banner across the top of each page explaining the reason for the protest.