So it makes it all the more shameful: Recording Industry sneak attack on Copyright

Surprise! The RIAA must have found a stooge in the House to sponsor (maybe more than one -- it will become clear tomorrow!) this very under-the-radar attack on Copyrights in the U.S. See
Statement of the United States Copyright Office
to the
Subcommittee on Courts,
the Internet, and Intellectual Property,
Committee on the Judiciary

United States House of Representatives
109th Congress, 2nd Session

May 16, 2006
Section 115 Reform Act (SIRA) of 2006

The SIRA addresses three principal concepts - blanket licensing, designated agents and royalty rates. (snip)

Additionally, we note that the SIRA resolves complaints by online music services about what they characterize as “double-dipping” in one context, providing for a royalty-free license for intermediate copies in the context of noninteractive streaming, but does not resolve other situations involving arguably duplicative payments demanded by copyright holders’ representatives for both the performance as well as the reproduction and distribution rights when a musical work is delivered by a mechanism which is not clearly solely a distribution or a performance. Although these other situations involve important issues, it is not necessary to resolve them at this time to make the SIRA an effective piece of legislation. Its absence from the SIRA may even prompt the interested parties to resolve it on their own. In fact, because the resolution of that issue is so difficult due to the positions taken by music publishers and performing rights organizations, it is actually a virtue of the SIRA that it defers resolution of that intractable issue to another day.

(emphasis provided) Does that seem ironic to you?

So here is a link to a hearing in the House on the Amendment: link

And a PDF draft of the Bill (which does not have a number on the draft here): link

And a link to William Patry's Copyright Blog link

and a link to IPAction.org link which lists who to contact, plus a number of these links, and a lot of outraged comments.