Last week, I wrote a post about the idea for something called Project EquilibRIAA. The idea was to reach out to the various musicians whose music was used in the trial against Joel Tenenbaum and here what they felt about it. Obviously, this had no legal basis, but was interesting from a cultural perspective, especially considering that just a day earlier the RIAA had declared that the trial wasn't about the RIAA but about how "Joel Tenenbaum and his egregious illegal behavior which robs artists and music creators of the right to be paid for their work." So, according to the RIAA, it's about the artists and their music, and I thought (as did the original poster of the suggestion) that it would be interesting -- no matter what they said -- to hear what musicians thought about the whole trial. No one suggested that it would have any bearing on the outcome. We just thought it would be a good experiment.

But what amazed me was the vitriol in the comments from the standard (small) group of RIAA supporters concerning this idea, and their absolutely dripping contempt for the actual musicians. Some samplings:

Comment #2: "It is entirely irrelevant, as the artists have signed away many of their rights (including those things that Joel was sued under). It would sort of like putting a dairy farmer in touch with a kid who stole milk posters at school. The relationship isn't relevant.

Comment #11: "I suspect you will get "wanna be cool party line" stuff, as each artist will dump a little crap on the RIAA, and then quietly cash the checks they keep getting."

Comment #12: "The artists don't have any rights. I don't care what the former owners of my car think about whether I've been maintaining it well or not and I don't care what the creator of a song who assigned the rights to someone else is now having cold feet about taking money from a record company. Bought, paid for, gone."

Comment #17: "What the Artists think doesn't mean crap. They all signed the distribution rights over to the record labels, and they are the ones that were wronged. I could care less if the artist stood on stage and told everyone to download their music, if they signed the distribution rights away, they are equally guilty of copyright infringement by telling people to download the music too."

This fascinates me. Statements like "it is entirely irrelevant" and "the artists don't have any rights" pretty much makes the point right there, doesn't it? These are the same people (yes, with the same IP addresses) who yell and scream about how what we discuss around here is insulting to artists and an effort to take away their "right to get paid." If this is all about respecting artists and helping them get fairly compensated, why are they so damn afraid of actually letting them speak? And why do they treat them with such contempt?

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