What is rhys david dictionary's license for now? What is  rhys david dictionary's license for now?


  Pali-English. Dictionary. EDITED BY. T. W. RHYS DAVIDS F.B.A. D.Sc.
  Ph.D. LL.D. D.Litt and WILLIAM STEDE Ph.D. Personal scientific use
  only. [1921-1925]
The blurb on Amazon.com says (about the PTS dictionary specifically),

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Looking at Wikipedia's descriptions of copyright durations (USA and UK) suggests that may be so (though I'm not a lawyer).
If you access it via a web site or other publisher, they may (I don't know) have other terms of use.

A PTS news page says,

10 May 2013
Following the generous donation of a long-standing member of the Society, the Pali Text Society is pleased to announce that the following works, whose copyright is owned by the Pali Text Society, are now issued under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC 3.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
The Pali Text Society retains all commercial rights, but permission is granted to reproduce, reformat, transmit and distribute these works for non-commercial use without further need to contact the Society.


So it's CC BY-NC 3.0 at least, and some sources (perhaps not the PTS) suggest it's public domain.
Its content exists (sometimes remixed with other content) on various web sites, which I use for free (i.e. gratis), so I suppose these are &quot;non-commercial&quot; sites which publish it noncommercially.