Tim Starling wrote:
The CD/DVD sets are apparently quite rare, Brian was lucky to get his hands on one at a fairly cheap price.
Not really.
There's the trademark issue -- Britannica may attempt to scare us with legal threats over this. A disclaimer on every HTML page declaring non-affiliation with Britannica would probably put us on sound legal footing, although I'd be willing to hear advice about this from people who are more knowledgeable. If the "LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia" (1911encyclopedia.org) can host this content, then we should be able to find a way too. And we can do it without the abominable license restrictions and "copyright traps" scattered throughout the work to enforce them.
It may turn out that their copyright traps are really their lack of OCR proofreading. :-)
Wikipedia owes a lot to the 1911 edition -- we've copied many of its articles. A public, canonical copy will be a valuable tool to deal with LoveToKnow's frequent OCR errors, its incompleteness, and its specious legal threats against us based on our use of unspecified copyright material hidden in their doctored online copy. Hopefully the availability of page images will spur development of a complete and accurate OCR copy.
Someone with a legitimate copyright claim does not need to hide traps in the text. Doing so cannot create new copyrights in the test, although they still have a copyright in the surrounding framework. I would go so far as to say that changing text for the sake of hidden copyrights may be a violation of the original author's moral rights.
Ec