RIC should still be under copyright - regulations vary, but the author's death + 70 years is common. The oldest of the RIC books is the obsolete original RIC vol. I of 1923 - the second of the authors (Mattingly) died in 1964, so that would mean it's still under copyright. If the work could be construed as being as that of an employee for an employer ("works made for hire"), then the rule could be 95 years from 1923, which would put it out of copyright. I don't think Mattingly & Sydenham were hired by Spink to write RIC, so I doubt this would hold water. The other RIC volumes are newer. Krause often include CDs or DVDs with their books, so somebody may have sold you one of those and kept the book. ATB, Aidan.
These topics always seem to bog down in copyright and wiggle room, but RIC X (which is one of the pirated copies) was published in 1994 and no matter how you slice it, is still copyrighted by Spink.
In the United States, the Copyright Act of 1976 eliminated the renewal requirement. Other countries may have never had a renewal requirement. Books on ancient coins typically did not have a US edition, and foreign copyright law probably applies. Spink has done the right thing by keeping the books in print, re-issuing them on CD-ROM, and registering with the Copyright Clearance Center per-page fees for academic use. We should treat their copyrights with respect. I have little sympathy for the copyrights of out-of-print works that are not registered with the center. A good strategy might be to download out-of-print works and buy new books from living authors rather than trying to track down obscure titles from the mid 20th century on the second hand market.
