In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:31:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time, fredbaud@fairpoint.net writes:
Legally, Wikipedia is private property belonging to a nonprofit corporation. If the United States government, or some other government, owned it and regulated it in such a way as to guarantee public access it would be a public website.
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.
In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:31:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time, fredbaud@fairpoint.net writes:
Legally, Wikipedia is private property belonging to a nonprofit corporation. If the United States government, or some other government, owned it and regulated it in such a way as to guarantee public access it would be a public website.
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.
There are public spaces which are enforced, for example, freedom of religion or of the press in the United States. But you are correct that words alone fail; such guarantees must be enforced by citizens with a commitment to them. But that is not fundamentally different from how Wikipedia, or any voluntary organization, works.
Fred
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 18:44, WJhonson@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
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