At this point, the US should repeal the law completely, and let the chips fall where they may. Hollywood says we'll see a loss of culture (fewer movies, songs, books).
Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.
There's scads of money being made on the infrastructure, network, and equipment that's used to pirate films. Perhaps companies like Google and Apple should be paying Hollywood more for the material that people consume through their hardware/software. Hollywood's decline would be bad for both of these companies.
How about if a bunch of other large countries simply dropped the laws and outright encouraged their population to 'pirate' American media?
If the countries/regions were large enough (like say, the whole EU, or China or Australia or whatever else), that'd really put the US in a bad situation. Either compromise and fix copyright laws, or 'fight back' against countries powerful enough to threaten them in return. How far would anyone go to 'save' the status quo?
That's probably going too far in the other direction. Perhaps start by limiting all copyrights to 5-10 years with no extension? If you can't make good money from IP in 5-10 years you shouldn't be relying on income from it anyway.
"At this point, the US should repeal the law that engineers need to be paid. People say it will result in unemployment.
Let's find out."
This is obvious a reckless idea.
I personally think that copyright should last maybe 10 years or so, so we're kind of on the same side of this.
...but arguing that hundreds of thousands of careers, billions of dollars of market cap, etc., should all be potentially destroyed because "I wonder what will happen? YOLO!" is a bad way to approach the debate.
There isn't a law that engineers need to be paid (or at least not any more than minimum wage.) I don't see how these are equivalent.
A more apt comparison would be "The US should make a law that all software must be released open source." Would we all be out of jobs if that happened? Maybe, but it's at least a debatable point.