They mean "tech neutral" the same way that the perpetually aggrieved classes mean "equal rights"

Composers, music publishers, and songwriters have told federal lawmakers that regardless of whether music is distributed to consumers via TV, DVDs or digital download, they need legislative help to ensure they get their fair share.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a story about how some of these groups want iTunes and other Web music retailers to pay performance fees for downloads of TV shows and films. They also want online music stores to cough up fees for 30-second song previews. Those revelations didn't go over well with many techies.  [-source]

You know that you have reached the point of parasitic no return when you are so greedy that you demand compensation from your own advertisers and salesmen for hawking your wares to the public. The fact that they regard companies like Apple as "the enemy" rather than their chance to profitably cut out the labels is proof enough that the mental rot in the music industry is so great that nothing short of flushing the entire thing down the toilet and starting over will be sufficient to "fix it."

All of this started with the shift in the way the public consumes media. Songwriters and publishers have for a long time collected performance fees from broadcast TV networks and film studios, but now more and more consumers are watching films and TV shows downloaded to their iPods or laptops, which at this point aren't considered public performances.

The private performance versus public performance dichotomy is precisely a great example of what is so very, very wrong with modern intellectual property rights. It would be intolerable for car companies to sell cars for "personal use" versus "corporate use" in that one is effectively licensing the right to drive a car for a specific class of use only from the manufacturer. It's not as if contract law provides them insufficient means to create semi-exclusive "public performance contracts" for the initial showing of a movie. It is also absurd to suggest that if a store owner buys a CD that they cannot play that CD on rotation in their store without paying an additional fee.

That is parasitism and an entitlement mentality, nothing more. The only solution is to govern copyrighted goods according to the majority of the norms and expectations of real property, provided that copyright holders wish to actually be called property owners.