Hmmm... The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica online is nice and all, but do we really need the ads? I'm all for presenting public domain texts on a web site, and I realize web hosting is expensive, especially if the site becomes popular. But the lack of a search engine or supplementary materials, the unlicensed use of the Brittanica trademark, and the vague falsely-insinuating legal notice are all indications of disingenuousness and exploitive use of public domain materials. Of course, you're allowed to post a public domain text without mentioning it is public domain, but it seems polite to do so, especially since nowadays U.S. copyright law assigns copyright status without requiring posting notice. Their legal notice implies the contents of the encyclopedia are exclusively controlled by the site owners (Pagewise, Inc., Austin, TX), which is not true.

This is, of course, merely the Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia, the complete classic Britannica 11th edition, and is freely available for download and setting up your own encyclopedia web site. The PG Encyclopedia doesn't even mention that this used to be the Encyclopedia Britannica, for trademark reasons. From PGE's introduction:

The original publisher offered Project Gutenberg a license to use the trademark, but the terms of the license were not consistent with the volunteer noncommercial nature of Project Gutenberg or its primary goal of distributing electronic text with the fewest possible restrictions. In order to avoid the possibility of trademark infringement, all references to the original title and the original publisher have been changed or deleted.

The PGE has been absorbed into larger open-content encyclopedia projects, which deserve to be linked in better company. The fabulous Everything2 and the interminably slow but otherwise great WikiPedia are both user-edited encyclopediae that contain PGE entries. (I could be wrong: Everything2's article set on the letter A-- an excellent demonstration of Everything2's brilliance, BTW-- does not include PGE's entry, though it does contain Webster's (1913 edition, also public domain). But WikiPedia obviously worked very hard to get most of PGE into their database.)

If you haven't heard of Project Gutenberg, a very old, very famous, and very great volunteer effort to create and distribute electronic versions of public domain texts, do check them out. Their copyright explanation page is an informative summary of current public domain rules.

I don't think what Pagewise is doing is necessarily wrong; public domain is public domain, you can do whatever you want with it. It's just a bit rude to throw PGE up on a web site with little effort and insinuate that you own it. (A look around other Pagewise sites gives the distinct impression that they're repurposing lots of external encyclopedic content to build an info-portal as cheaply as possible. Not worth the look, really.) If I had the bandwidth (ay, there's the rub), I'd set up an ad-free PGE web site, with a search engine and everything. Wouldn't take more than a couple of weekends to set up a rudimentary searchable site, a page per entry with an index...