About one week ago, Gene Simmons filed a trademark claim to own the sign language gesture for "I love you," because clearly he has no idea how to actually do the iconic "devil horns."
Simmons says he invented the gesture, even though it's fairly widely accepted that Ronnie James Dio popularized it before Simmons. Even Dio's wife came out and called Simmons ridiculous, and cited examples of the gesture being used in rock before Ronnie James used it. Of course, Simmons fired back by saying he invented it, and also threw in that Kiss invented rocking out in sync on stage, which wasn't even relevant to the argument – he just figured you should know. Previous interviews with Simmons revealed that he stole the hand gesture from Spider Man.
Now according to the United States Patent And Trademark Office, Simmons has quietly withdrawn his application. The supplementary files on the site don't appear to give any specific reason as to why Simmons has abandon trying to trademark the gesture, but I'd imagine it's a mixture of bad press and the fact that this whole thing is completely insane.
Oh well. Maybe he'll try to trademark something else next week, like synchronized stage moves or the phrase "Hello Cleveland!"
