This is a disaster. Bush is an idiot for signing this, but just remember who controls congress. Looks like there's finally something both parties can agree on, and that's to use government resources to enforce sweeping, intrusive copyright laws.
Both parties get donations from the content cartels, and do what their paymasters tell them. Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.
Repubs only get token money from RIAA and MPAA and their members. They go along on this one because they're the stupid party. The Dems would probably go along for free because they're the evil party, but they're happy to take the money, and it's a lot of money. (The Dems big three donor classes are trial lawyers, wall street, and "entertainment", read MPAA/RIAA members.)
It's irrelevant. Copyright is dead (by which I mean that business models based on selling copies of a piece of information are becoming non-viable); the worst this bill will do is harm a few thousand individual file sharers. This will slow down the transition to the information-is-free-as-in-beer society, but it cannot halt it.
This is not to be read as a moral judgement: what I say is true regardless of whether I -- or anyone else -- approves of it. Bits are copiable, and the law cannot change that, any more than a law could make water not wet. The only way to stop filesharing would be to destroy the computing and Internet infrastructure, which no nation can do unless it wants to be as poor as North Korea.
In the medium term the main effect of this might be to stimulate the creation of new P2P software that is more robust against attacks, and which makes it harder for the MAFIAA to snoop on what files people are sharing.
