Copyright law itself, is a work of fiction; a figment of someone's imagination jotted down on a piece of paper that should through it's own creation be protected as intellectual property not to be exploited by a corporate entity known as the gubmint who didn't pay for it nor paid for it's use.
In most cases the original creator of a copyrighted item is credited to the person, but the monetary rewards are granted to his/her employer. This is especially true for Engineers working for large corporations, even if it was not an item related to the work they were doing for that company. If you want to benefit from holding a copyright, you must be unemployed :)
Greetings!
You're right, and that's one reason I decided to go freelance way back, around 1989. I had been working as a magazine journalist, and all the companies started to bring in contracts saying that you had no rights to your own work. Before that we kind of did have rights (if we wanted to risk losing our jobs). One of my first jobs was writing stories for teenage magazines, and one day the company asked me if I would agree to my story being syndicated, because a Dutch company wanted to buy it. I was flushed with pride that someone wanted to buy my story, and said yes. Of course I got no extra money for it. That was the last time anyone asked me for permission to make extra money for my work, because after that all of those contracts came in.
In the late 1990s I had what seemed like a great freelance commission editing travel books from home. I agreed to a payment of about £4000 for each one. However one of them was in a terrible state and had to be practically rewritten. The whole process took several months, as I kept being told to do revisions of various bits. Eventually I demanded more payment, as it was working out about £1.50 an hour! The company boss just kept avoiding my calls, and eventually a more junior person agreed to pay me more. They never hired me again - but that book was in print worldwide for years, consistently got five-star reviews and must have made tens of thousands for the company. Every time I googled my name I would see five-star reviews of that book. At one point I was googling the 1960s soul legend Jimmy Helms, and I noticed that my name had more hits than his name! And all because of that book. Yet the company was so pissed off at having to pay me £6000 to rewrite the thing that it never hired me again!
The book still comes up linked to my name, but these days it's mainly Russian bootleg copies. Good on em!