Problems With Getting Black's Law Dictionary...???
Q: I noticed I couldn't find public domain editions of Black's Law Dictionary 1st Edition (published in 1891) or Black's Law Dictionary 2nd Edition (published in 1910) on Google Books or any other places online where you would expect to find such text. I have scanned copies of both books and wanted to slowly start the process of creating a plain text version so the works so that they could be used to their fullest. I was under the impression that both of these books would fall under the public domain by now and the only reason they weren't online is because no one wanted to do the work of converting the text (the two editions together have over 2,000 pages). I didn't want to start working on this project until I knew for sure that this was the case, so I e-mailed the current copyright holders of the Black's Law Dictionary Library. They told me that the 1st and 2nd editions were in fact not in the public domain and I could not publish transcripts of their works under breach of copyright. Does anyone know if they just don't want parts of their dictionary collection (albeit old ones) floating out there so they told me that, or do they have some legal ground which would allow them to still hold copyright to these books?
A: I never was an attorney and I have deminimus knowledge of Copyright Law. Therefore, what I write below has the value of