Some censorship is both necessary and desirable. Indeed the US state wrongly (in my view) permits some things to be said that would rightly be restrainable and in some cases criminal in most other countries and also wrongly restricts the law of libel. The UK law of libel is too generous in some respects and too restrictive in others, and the US refusal to enforce UK defamation awards in relation to things done in the UK to claimants in the UK is a shocking rejection of what lawyers call "the comity of nations" (particularly when compared to the terms the US likes to ram into its extradition treaties although these relate to criminal rather than civil law).

Some laws of intellectual property are desirable, but perhaps more in the USA than anywhere else the tendency has been for the monopolies or other protections afforded by intellectual property have tended to grow to excess. The USA has tried to export some of these excesses to other jurisdictions - a case in point being the criminisation of the removal of copy protection even if the copy protection needs to be removed to exercise rights that are entrenched in copyright law to back up or decompile computer programs.

The Sherlock Holmes estate are great proponents of trade-mark style protection (based on "secondary meaning") for characters delineated in literary works that are out copyright, and the pre-emptive effect of copyright expiry needs to be clearer. The examples Max gives above about discussion of Rudolf are likely (I am guessing, not having seen the correspondence) to be founded not so much in copyright but on a very greedy interpretation of character protection, under US common-law trademark and/or statutory trade-mark laws.

The USA has however a broader general "fair use" copyright exemption (including "parody") from copyright protection than many other countries, and some examples of arguments put by "anti-censorship" campaigners fail to recognise this and also fail to recognise the breadth of the US view of "transformative use". A number of the arguments I have heard or seen that might appear to be focussed on the recent Bill seem inaccurately to conflate the two.