No it is not right to abuse copyrights, but the truth behind the matter as I see it, the bill is just to maximize a powerful tool for the sole benefit the few.

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The "few" being the owners of those copyrights. Who, by the way, are not ALL giant, faceless corporations.

"However, the incentive for creators under work-for-hire is primarily the paycheck..."

The paycheck they receive because they are creating intellectual property for the company, which has hired them because they can protect that intellectual property with a copyright.

"I am not suggesting that work-for-hire creations should necessarily be less protected than creator owned properties. I do, however, consider it ass backwards that they receive greater protections."

But they don't.  In the U.S. at least, the term on a work for hire is 120 years from creation or 95 years from publication, whichever is earlier.  A work not created under a work for hire contract receives protection for the life of the author plus 70 years.  It is a reasonable assumption that most works not created under work for hire would be at least 95 years .  Certainly, there are exceptions where an author dies young or creates something late in life, but there would also be exceptions where a creator's copyright extends well beyond 95 years too.

"The paycheck they receive because they are creating intellectual property for the company, which has hired them because they can protect that intellectual property with a copyright."

I covered this. The incentive for a company to hire creative people is the profit they make. This profit is ensured by a copyright. A yield of maybe a 20% profit (in a year), more if it takes several years to recoup, is more than enough to incentivize that. For most scenarios that will mean maybe 1 year, certainly less than 5.  After that, there is only continued production of an established profitable commodity. Not creation.

This all ties back to the moral argument of copyright, that its purpose is to reward and encourage creativity. This argument is not served by endless continuation of corporate copyrights. Nor is it necessarily served by a copyright that greatly outlasts the creator's lifetime.

The financial argument of copyright is that those who finance the creation of a copyrightable work, should have copyrights to ensure that their investments are recouped and a reasonable profit is made. That goal is served in far closer to 5 years than 95.

The current time limits on copyrights and other measures are not designed to foster creativity, yet the argument of "rewarding creativity" is still used because it's a strong, visceral, moral argument.

As for the 95 year limits on published works vs Life+70, I know of them. However, the point is clearly that it's fixed at no less than 95 for corporations. If the law was really oriented towards creators, creator owned properties would have 95 years or life+70, whichever was longest.

And my point is not that corporations should not have copyrights. It is that copyright law should start off doing what it's supposed to do, and which it claims to do, namely directly incentivizing creativity by ensuring that creative people get rewarded and protected through copyrights.

The copyrights of corporations are an afterthought. Especially when one is beyond a creative phase, beyond making a reasonable profit and what we're really talking about is producing more of old products for new profits.

Ah, but he would not be subject to the SOPA law, since his website is American. If a British member of parliament did the same, he would of course be blocked from the US.

I'm just curious. Let's say that a security tape from a Chinese prison revealed human rights abuses. The security tape would of course be the property of and copyright to the prison or the government.

A dissident, at great risk to himself, places the video on the internet, on a non-chinese server, but not an american one (European, Australian, Japanese, whatever.) The Chinese Government wants to get it shut down, but it's not on their servers, so they would not have the power to do so.

With SOPA in hand, couldn't they demand that the US shut off access to any non-US website mentioning this tape, due to copyright infringement? With an appeal being dependent on this dissident showing up in a US Court asking for the blocking to be overturned?

I'm just wondering. I know it's a far-fetched scenario, but I wish the press would ask the legislators questions like that (and get answers).

I think the biggest problem is that if these laws are passed in the US, they'll also try to pass them in the rest of the world. Once access to American sites from the rest of the world start getting blocked (using US standards), it's going to get messy.

Imagine if Amazon.com suddenly becomes inaccessible because there's some random copyrighted image in the wrong place. Or Itunes. Or some news site. Imagine the shitstorm if Fox News discovered they were being censored all over the world because of an unproven allegation of some minor copyright infringement on their website.

If there's one thing we've noticed, it's that there are a lot of US politicians and pundits who don't understand that if they introduce protectionist policies against other countries, there's going to be reciprocity.