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You can't steal something from the public domain, period; nor by doing what was described above can you convert a public domain to your exclusive commercial use, period. What you can do is take a public domain work, stick it in a book, and copyright whatever is copyrightable in your particular edition. For example, if a publisher decides Great Expectations would look perfect if all the a's were changed to x's and published it that way, then maybe someone doing the same could be sued for infringement. More to the point if you do what Barnes and Nobles did with their Classics series, which is to add commentary, footnotes, you can't simply copy one of their editions, because the commentary and notes and the nice cover are copyrightable. But that does not in any way remove the original work from the public domain. Anyone who is running a business on that basis might scam a few people into thinking that they actually own public domain works, but if they try to get infringement money from someone it will backfire, and they will be the ones in legal trouble.
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