But in 1998, Congress extended the length of copyright from 75 years to 95, or from 50 to 70 years after the author’s death

It means you can do as you please with these works (as long as your local laws don’t restrict that), so Google Books will now offer the full text of books from that year, instead of showing only snippet views or authorized previews — to use one of the most commonly used examples

Our data indicate no statistically significant difference, for example, between the listeners’ judgments of the quality of professional audiobook readers of copyrighted and public domain texts.

that they will be tarnished, by being reproduced in low quality ways or associated with undesirable things

over-exploited, with too many people using them and therefore reducing their worth

that works which fall into the public domain will be under-exploited, because there will be no incentive to produce new works

Tribe recently wrote a white paper for Moody’s about the rating companies and the First Amendment, which the company offered to share with Kanjorski. Moody’s declined to release the white paper to the Investigative Fund.

Moody’s has spent $820,000 this year on lobbyists that include former Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C,) and former Rep. Vic Fazio (D-Calif.)

His brother, John Podesta, was co-chairman of President Obama’s transition committee. The Podesta group also has Israel Klein, Schumer’s former communications director, lobbying for the rating company.

Of the big three raters, Standard & Poor’s has spent the most so far this year on lobbying — about $1.5 million — though that amount includes some lobbying for its parent company, McGraw Hill. Standard & Poor’s lobbyists also have cast the widest net — taking their case to the White House, SEC, FDIC, Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, records show.

In the first nine months of 2009, records show, the companies collectively spent almost $2.7 million, already $180,000 more than they spent in all of 2008 and the most they have ever spent in a year.

Floyd Abrams, the renowned First Amendment lawyer who has defended Standard & Poor’s for more than 20 years, said that the SEC already has “significant oversight powers.”

Brian Fallon, said in an e-mail that the rating companies “treated their ratings as negotiable to please their clients, and ended up as one of the main culprits behind the economic crisis

Jerome Fons, a Moody’s managing director, recalled in a recent interview that he was on vacation in March 2004 when the SEC called to pitch the idea.

Leo C. O’Neill, then president of S&P, declined. “I don’t think that we should be asked to waive our rights under the First Amendment,” he said.

filed a comment objecting that among other things new regulation would “Erode the First Amendment rights of all publishers of credit opinion.” The SEC eventually abandoned the plan.

Until the 1970s, the raters charged investors for their work. Then they shifted, assigning fees to the corporations that issue the bonds.

At a Senate hearing that spring, he encouraged the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission not to ignore the raters’ central argument against government interference — that their ratings of bonds are just opinions, protected by the First Amendment.

When the bonds defaulted, investors lost billions.

Michael Siebecker, a University of Florida law professor and former arbitrator for the National Association of Securities Dealer

The companies say they gather facts to form educated opinions about the safety of bonds. Ratings are not, the companies say, guarantees that the bonds will or will not default.

He announced at a September 2007 Senate hearing

He and three other senators — Michael Enzi, a Wyoming Republican; John Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican; and Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey — wrote Cox a letter in May 2007 to “express our concern” over the plan

Fitzpatrick, who lost his seat in the 2006 midterm

The bill passed and was signed by President Bush in September 2006

At another Senate hearing in April 2006, Schumer, the New York Democrat, questioned then-SEC Chairman Christopher Cox about showing “sensitivity” to the companies’ First Amendment rights.

Standard & Poor’s submitted a memo to Congress that said the bill had “fatal constitutional defects.”

Kanjorski was one of the 165 Democrats who voted against Fitzpatrick’s bill. Kanjorski is now chairman of the House subcommittee on capital markets and the author of the pending credit rating oversight legislation

The legislation nonetheless passed the House in 2006

At a 2005 hearing, Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.,) warned that Congress must be “very sensitive to the First Amendment issue posed in these debates.”

Moody’s saw net income of $560 million and Standard & Poor’s reported $1 billion, including earnings from its S&P stock index.

On the wall of his Langhorne, Pa., law office, former congressman Michael Fitzpatrick hangs a framed copy of the bill that he had hoped would rein in the rating companies

An SEC spokesman declined to discuss decisions made under past SEC chairmen or the commission’s current regulatory proposals.

Roberts said he first warned the commission 15 years ago about the danger of lax oversight

Richard Y. Roberts, who was an SEC commissioner from 1990 to 1995

No new rules arose from the hearings.

filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

The SEC approved the rule — and the exemption for rating companies

When corporations, banks or local governments want to borrow money from investors, they issue debt in the form of bonds. The rating companies determine the likelihood of default by assigning bonds a letter grade — ranging from the safest triple-A to the “junk” bond status of C or lower.

The companies have been around for a century, growing increasingly important to the U.S. and global financial systems.

With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Adding is only one operation

Today we make the record conventionally by writing and photography, followed by printing; but we also record on film, on wax disks, and on magnetic wires

The economics of the situation were against it

Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

fighting has ceased

It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”