www.blackmask.com was a great resource, second only to gutenberg.com
as a resource of copyright free books online.  I know Blackmask was
closed down over a copyright dispute involving pulp fiction novels
like "The Shadow".  You might as well tell me all the inside gossip on
the case.  I don't like other sites which you have to page through
each chapter and copy them one by one, (my bandwith is very low), so I
like the book all in one big lump.  I convert text to speech and burn
them onto cd's to listen to at work.  Gutenberg is great, of course,
but I sure miss Blackmask.  Can you tell me if they are coming back or
suggest a good site to 'second' gutenberg?  I want Schiller and
Lovecraft and Victor Hugo type stuff.  Oh, and ghost stories.  Love
them...  And educational things generally.

You might find this page to be of interest:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html

Another nice list of links to e-text collections:

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/colls.html

A nice site with a wide variety of free e-texts:

http://manybooks.net/

You can find quite a bit of fact and commentary about Blackmask on this site:

http://www.teleread.org/blog/index.php?s=blackmask

Thank you for the excellent links.  On gutenberg Australia I even
found Lovecraft's essay on supernatural literature.  I'll keep digging
around in them.   I wish I could find, "Hans of Iceland" by Victor
Hugo...  He's been dead over a hundred years, he must be entirely out
of copyright.  There must be many books which could be legally
presented on the net and people just haven't gotten around to.  People
are too interested in lame modernists writers. (Nothing decent
authorially  but Camus and Conrad has been written in the last hundred
years, not to be an old fogey.)  But anyway, thanks, you've given me
several new ideas.

I really enjoyed Dostoevsky's speech on Pushkin.  Awesome.  I'm going
to check back here all the time; and ask questions too, I'm afraid...

Here you'll find Victor Hugo's "Hans of Iceland" in its original French:

http://www.bookrags.com/ebooks/6994/

I would love to be able to post an official answer to your question,
but, in regard to the Blackmask site, I cannot give an authoritative
response to "Will it come back?" I doubt that anyone can answer that.
I also cannot provide "all the inside gossip," as you requested in
your initial question. If there is any way that I can assist you
further that would allow me to post an answer that would be fully
satifactory, please let me know.

Part of the problem with BMOnline is that the gentleman (used loosely)
who operated the website was not adverse to taking whatever he wanted
from other people, groups, et cetera, slapping his own 'This [section
of eText] copyrighted by Blackmask', and then deriving any sort of
profit from it.

Problem 1: Taking the work of others and claiming it as one's own is
ethically wrong. I know with 100% certainty that he would download
public domain texts that certain specific organisations would produce
using volunteer labour, who would reformat the text as an eText (thus
substantially changing the structure of the work for the benefit of
others) and then publish it for free online. Along comes Moynihan,
downloads the text, and then claims it as his own labour in producing
the eText. Very dirty. I personally experienced this problem more than
once.

Problem 2: If you re-publish works into the public domain that are in
a possible 'grey area' as far as internatial copyright agreements are
concerned, you are simply asking for trouble. Black Mask Online did
that. Now they are getting punished for doing it in such a brash and
open manner.

As to whether the site will ever regain its former glory, no one can
be certain of that at this point, as was already noted by another
commenter. But if the same methods are used, I at least am very
certain that it will fail as a publically accessible database of
eTexts.