Business

Do you have exams for Thursday morning? You had better get your skates on, as Wikipedia is to go offline on Wednesday for 24 hours, in protest of anti-piracy US legislation.

The truth-ish lazy person's fact-checker will take part in a "blackout" tomorrow amongst fellow user-generated sites such as Reddit to protest their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act [Sopa] and Protect Intelluctual Propert Act [Pipa]. On the plus side, at least any pub quiz nights held tomorrow will be amazing.

Both proposals are currently being debated by US Congress and are designed to stop Internet users from accessing what are described as "rogue websites" to access copyrighted content.

"Proponents of Sopa have characterised the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy," Wikipedia's googly-eyed founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC, taking a break from harassing his site's users for money in creepy adverts.

"But that's not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy."

In protest of Wikipedia's actions, we at JOE will deliberately insert a few basic factual errors into tomorrow's news articles, which will be done completely on purpose and through no human error of our own. Ahem.