At some point all these exceptions to the dmca section 1201 do at some point indicate to me that we need to have the law updated to be more narrowly tailored rather than continuously apply exceptions to it which can later be taken away.
We petitioned for an exemption to allow museums and libraries to reboot old MMOs in closed rooms with no network connections. That's because we couldn't get anything more from the Copyright office. Still, the RIAA's lawyer was there to lie and not understand a god damn thing we said, and accuse us of making tools that could be used to pirate any MMO.
I begged for them to tell me where to find such tools, as it would make life so much easier. Their lawyers were complete imbeciles who seemed never to have touched a computer, yet here they were telling a group of game programmers what they could and could not do with their programs.
Fucking horrible people, all of them.
The RIAA generally doesn't have any involvement in video games, other than where its members license music to games (i.e., GTA), and they generally wouldn't have any grounds for being part of the proceedings you've described if their involvement was just the music licensing.
I can see the ESA being a huge dick in these proceedings, because it's their job to do that, but the RIAA literally wouldn't care as long as somebody paid the music licensing fee (for that low volume of users the licensing fee would generally be less than $100 annually, all inclusive).
I've been on the other side of an RIAA negotiation, and they were very easy to work with. We theoretically owed them millions of dollars for several years of unlicensed music streaming, and they waived the statutory penalties they were legally entitled to in exchange for us agreeing to pay a few hundred dollars of royalties a year to stream their members' music. All told, we paid less than $2500/year for streaming licenses for all of the Big 3 labels and a dozen or more smaller labels.
Appears the same lawyer was representing ESA/RIAA/MPAA.
I briefly started reading some of them a while back and they're, uh, frustrating to read.
218 Congresspeople
60 Senators
1 President
5 Supreme Court (in)justices.
A conservative estimate is that getting the DMCA reformed would cost at least a billion dollars in bribes ('campaign contributions'). No one who has that much money spare has enough of an interest in public-interest copyright reform to be willing to spend that much money.
As a practical matter, it's much more feasible to cultivate hosting infrastructure outside of the United States than to consider DMCA reform.
As they're written into international treaties every functional Western democracy has them.
Pretty much the only exemption is Israel.
You can look up how much the RIAA and MPAA spent on campaign contributions. It wasn't a billion dollars.
And "campaign contributions" are only one path to victory. You could also go the route of getting Wikipedia et al to do what they did for SOPA.
I do like Tom Scott's comprehensive video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU