Yes and the individuals comprising the company have no individual legal claim to anything the company creates save for any shares they hold.
The shareholders are the owners of the company. They have plenty of legal claims for all sorts of things (there is an enormous branch of law dealing with these things), and shareholders are the ultimate authority for a corporation.
Big difference between an engineer at Boeing holding patent over a subsystem or component and Boeing holding patent, no matter how you try to spin it. The engineer or engineers involved certainly aren't making as much as they could be, and many that have no hand in the invention benefit far in excess of them.
This is incorrect and/or misstating things on numerous levels.
First, when you are thinking of corporations, you keep thinking of Boeing, when in fact companies the size of Boeing are less than 1% of all companies. It's like drawing conclusions about how easy or hard it is to dunk a basketball for men overall using as your example Yao Ming, who is 7 ft, 6 in tall. So, first thing is that you've got ideas about corporations that don't fit 99% of corporations.
Second, I don't think you have an accurate idea of even that 1% like Boeing. An engineer at Boeing is making as much as he could -- otherwise, he can go elsewhere to make more. He is totally free to do that. That's because we have a free market and not indentured servitude. He can work somewhere else that pays him more, he can have his own company as a consultant (if he is good enough), he can invent something and (again, if it is valuable enough) go raise money and form his own company to capitalize on it.
Third, I don't think you have an accurate idea of how innovation works in various company settings or why. I've invented things and innovated at large companies (GM), 200-ish-person companies, and tiny 3-person companies (as a co-founder). As a co-founder, you get a much bigger piece of the pie, but you are also the one who has to get things funded, built, working in all respects, marketed, selling. You take lots of risk and might not have a steady salary and benefits (or any salary or benefits) as you are getting things started. When you work at an established place, they start paying you salary and benefits in the hope that you will do good things. But they don't pay you only after a year or so when they see how it's all working out. Also, for an established company, lots and lots of folks (before you) already invented things, built products, developed markets, got things selling, etc., and built a larger organization that you are plugging into. Regardless, if your job is to innovate, they are paying you to do that, and you are working there to do it as your choice for what works best for you -- otherwise, again, you are free to go out and do it yourself.
Nothing is muddied when you go from a company of 3 people to a company of 30,000 people. They are both collections of people working collectively. One just has 3 people in it and one 30,000 people in it. One might have a new thing that comprises 100% of the value of the company, and the other might have 3 million things that were developed over 100 years, and one person's innovation adds a miniscule percentage of total value. It all depends.
mostly in capacity of a human shield for large corporate when it comes to legislation.
If you do something illegal in a corporation, there is no shield for you.
The shield you talk about involves only the credits and liabilities of a corporation as a result of corporate actions.
For example: If you are the president of Kampherco and you ordered people in your company to murder someone or steal from someone, you and they and the company would suffer liability for it. If the company took out a loan and defaulted on it or sold a product and got sued because of that product (but you didn't do anything illegal), this is where you would suffer only through what you own of the company, and creditors of the company would not be able to come after your and your family's personal assets. This is just practical stuff.
