On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 18:44, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
My point Fred, is there is no such animal. So calling
something a "private
website" is redundant, since all websites are private, there are no public
websites. Certainly there are websites owned by governments, but they are
not public in the sense above that there is guaranteed access to *modify*
their contents.
Let's turn it the other way: there is hardly _any_ objects on the
internet where anyone have the legal *right* to do anything at all.
(Be that websites or other services.)
Local governmental sites may offer local citizens services which they
do have legal right to access and the provider have no right to deny
them access, but I'm sure even these sites have terms of service which
makes it possible to deny these rights for certain behaviours. I doubt
anyone would provide an internationally accessible service usable by
people's personal rights, ever.
So, the original question was wrong and the answer was proper: nobody
have legal right to use the Wikimedia projects (or, in fact, any
websites), and no court could probably enforce that against the terms
of the services of the given site. (Maybe not even beyond that, at
all.) Every websites are private property, and you're either a
customer using the service, or related to the owner somehow; in all
other cases you're fobidden to utilise someone else's resources, and
you may be offered legal charges for that.
g