Jeez... just raise the price of albums, dummies! That's what you get for going to music school instead of business school. A 10-12 song album has costed $10-$15 since I was 8 years old! That's like three decades ago.
My understanding is they want to eliminate the "Safe Harbour" provision of the DMCA. Basically, Safe Harbour says that internet companies can't get sued for stuff their customers upload and aren't responsible for monitoring it all. But, still have to make reports to law enforcement in special cases (child porn has be to reported w/ in 72 hours, for example).
The problem is though, the DMCA is already being abused. And, if safe harbour disappears, the DMCA could be abused to shutdown sites like wikileaks, cryptome, Snowden's e-mail provider, Dropbox, Youtube, and basically everything else anyone (especially the government) doesn't like. And, if you get someone like LavaBit who says no, the government can just step up the chain and sue Verizon, ATT, or Comcast, of anyone else that provides fiber network transport all the way to the server they don't like.
I'm sorry, but it is just time for the Music industry to change. They need to make their money off touring and selling albums and other digital content (while that still lasts). There's nothing anyone can do about it. This whole thing of like old gray faced wall street exec guys suing anyone that writes a song with the same 5 notes in the same order as some crappy song that was written like 100 years ago that their hedge fund bought the rights too when the artist died 50 years ago is stupid. They are killing art and killing the industry. Let derivative works flourish, drop geolocking (one of the biggest problems - especially for older artists like Jewel), let copyright expire 10 years after the author dies, make money touring, make money off sites like StageIt, make money off crowd funding on kickstarter, or patreon, or even just do it as a hobby if you have to. No one owes artists a perpetual stream of income or a 1%er living in a Beverly Hills mansion. Do I still get "royalties" (I hate that word, like they're a King/Queen getting taxes or something) for documentation and code I wrote at a job 20 years ago? Nope, I got paid by the hour or by the project and that was that.
If HBO and Netflix and Movie companies can figure out models to make intellectual property based entertainment work, so can musical artists. I think it's just that they're try to use big government to force people back into the past instead of evolving. That is just not going to work.
Times are changin'. Notice that there's no young artists in that list of signatures.
