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Among the wonders of the Internet, Wikipedia occupies a special place. From its birth 11 years ago it has professed, and has tried reasonably hard to practice, a kind of idealism that stands out in the vaguely, artificially countercultural ambience of Silicon Valley. Google’s informal corporate mantra — “Don’t Be Evil” — has become ever more cringe-making as the company pursues its world conquest.

But Wikipedia, while it has grown something of a bureaucratic exoskeleton, remains at heart the most successful example of the public-service spirit of the wide-open Web: nonprofit, communitarian, comparatively transparent, free to use and copy, privacy-minded, neutral and civil.

As I followed the latest battle in the great sectarian war over the governing of the Internet — the attempt to curtail online piracy — I was startled to see that Wikipedia’s founder and philosopher, Jimmy Wales, who generally stays out of the political limelight, had assumed a higher profile as a combatant for the tech industry. He supplied an aura of credibility to a libertarian alliance that ranged from the money-farming Megatrons of Google to the hacker anarchists of Anonymous.

Et tu, Jimmy?

For those of you who have not followed this subject, the latest skirmish concerns the rampant online theft of songs, films, books and other content. Separate bills would have given the US government new tools to go after digital bootleggers. The central purpose of the legislation — rather lost in the rhetorical crossfire and press coverage — was to extend the copyright laws that protect content-creators in the United States to offshore havens where the most egregious pirates have set up shop. Like most people who make their living the way I do, I think parasite Web sites should be treated with the same contempt as people who pick pockets or boost cars.

But the legislation in question, drafted by the once-mighty entertainment industries, was vague and ham-handed, a case of overreach by Hollywood’s lobbyists. The partisans of an unfettered Internet saw their moment, and seized it. They unleashed a wave of protest that included much waving of the First Amendment and an attention-grabbing blackout of Wikipedia, the company’s most conspicuous foray into protest politics. The legislation is dead, and proponents of the open Web have shown they are the new power in Washington.

The question is, how will they use their muscle now? Does this smackdown mean that any attempt to police the Web for thievery is similarly doomed?

Wales, when I connected with him in London, was the voice of reason compared with some members of the openness alliance. He disavows the hacker anarchists — whose most recent stunt to protest enforcement of the copyright laws was to sabotage the US Justice Department’s Web site — as “incredibly counterproductive.”

He said he believes copyright protection is “unquestionably good” but that enforcement should focus on serious criminal enterprises, not the music fan who burns a copy for a friend or the search engine that merely offers the link to a bad place. (Agreed.)

He worries that, under too-sweeping legislation, a site like Wikipedia could be punished because its very informative article about the aptly named site “The Pirate Bay” includes a link to the offending destination.

Wales thinks the current copyright protections — which require content-makers to watch out for piracy of their own material and notify Internet hosts to take it down — work fine in the United States. He grants that enforcement in foreign countries is a problem, but he opposes as burdensome and stifling any effort to make search engines filter what flows through them.

“Basically, we need some serious reform,” Wales told me. “Everything should be on the table. But it’s not a war; it’s a giant public policy question.”

Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy, there’s the rub. These days in Washington, everything is a war. This is a complicated subject that has been turned into simplistic sloganeering by rival vested interests dressed up as the saviors of freedom.

When the founders enshrined free speech in the US Constitution, they did not mean “free” in the sense of Wikipedia. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in an important 1985 Supreme Court decision supporting intellectual property rights, “the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing a marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.”

Content-makers would be crazy to let the Internet be stunted as a force for invention, mobilization and shared wisdom. At the same time, online companies would be crazy to let piracy kill off the commerce that supplies quality material upon which even free sites like Wikipedia depend.

Bill Keller is a New York Times columnist.