Patent does not apply here, copyright does. And the US copyright lasts 70 years after the death of the author, and for companies, 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter.
Repeal of the Glass-Stegal Act was not the cause of the 2008 crisis! Also Glass-Stegal was never regulation to protect individuals. It had nothing to do with customers. Glass-Stegal did allow big banks to get much bigger but it was not about protecting individuals. Glass-Stegal forbid commercial bank from becoming investment banks. The crisis in 2008 was caused by subprime lending, complicit ratings agencies and a derivatives market that speculated against those loans. Glass-Stegal would not have prevented this! I wish people would stop propagating this misinformation. The only reason its relevant to the crisis is because it allowed banks to become "too big to fail", not because it would have prevented banks the players from engaging in reprehensible behavior.
I wasn't referring to Glass-Stegal but rather the collusion between the the banks and the ratings agency, or banks selling products to investors and then betting against them.
Glass-Stegal would however further my point, its the regulatory capture in the financial industry that allowed that to happen, and by that I mean appointing an investment banking executive from Wall Street to head the Federal Reserve.
