By: Graham "Gruhamed" Hartmann
GENE SIMMONS is a douche.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, the KISS bassist recently stated during a panel at the MIPCOM Convention in Cannes, France, that the music industry should literally sue anyone and everyone who has ever illegally downloaded music off the internet. The cow-tongued Simmons spewed:
Make sure your brand is protected. Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don’t let anybody cross that line…The music industry was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we’re left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There’s no industry.
Well thats understandable, Gene is simply making a comment about the struggling economy and increasingly shrinking job market in the music industry. Mr. Simmons is concerned about the people who rely on music industry based careers so they can not just support their community, but bring home a steady paycheck so they can feed their families. Even when he charges them $50 for KISS Mr. Potato Heads, $200 for an autographed KISS comic book, $80 for a KISS dartboard (unfortunately without Gene's face on it) and $5000 for an autographed KISS casket, so when these poor unemployed executives die of starvation, perhaps their loved ones will shell out five grand for a fucking coffin.
Unfortunately "Anonymous," a group of hackers housed within the depths of 4chan, didn't understand Gene's concern for the common man. So what did they do? Shut down Gene's personal website with a denial of service (DOS) attack. Anonymous became widely known after their sudden takeover of The Church of Scientology's website, as well as the posting of their own youtube video, Message to Scientology, which now has over 4 million views. After Gene's site once again became available, he posted:
Some of you may have heard a few popcorn farts re: our sites being threatened by hackers. Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say “adventurous” young people, who feel they are above the law.
And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off.
First, they will be punished. Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who’s been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend.
We will soon be printing their names and pictures.
We will find you.
You cannot hide.
As I write this article (Oct 18 at 5pm) Gene's website is still down from a second DOS attack, and I say bravo! But in all seriousness, suing your everyday teens and young adults who merely download music in order to save time, money and to enrich their own lives is not the way to handle the slow death of an increasingly obsolete business model. Support the bands you love by seeing them live, buying CD's and merch from them personally, letting them crash on your floor or even just sending them a message on Myspace letting them know how much their music means to you. These are the actions that keep bands playing and writing new material. Buying their CD at Best Buy, shipped by a distributor, who license the music from a record company, who pay a manufacturer to make the CD, doesn't help the band financially. I'm by no means anti-record company or anti-business, because they deserve something for their hard work as well, especially if they embrace the evolution of the industry and focus on innovation. Gene represents what is wrong with the industry today; money hungry, trigger happy and completely out of touch. And these are the reasons why when you type Gene Simmons is an asshole into Google, you get 2,510,000 results.
