Ouch. You can almost hear Anonymous wheeling around their (illegal) DDoS missiles. And, sure enough, little more than 24 hours later Simmons' online brand has been knocked off the internet.

Anonymous attack Gene Simmons (Though we have to point out that Simmons has perhaps forgotten about the efforts made by Metallica, for example, which named 300,000 users of Napster back in 2000 and got them kicked off the system. Dr Dre did the same. Asleep at the wheel? Hardly. It's just the flipside of the benefit that being big brought - where the record companies could output something to lots of people at once. When they had to chase individuals, their problem became much bigger.)

As Slyck rightly points out, the loose-tongued rocker is the latest target of a group which counts the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America, Copyright Alliance, Ministry of Sound, solicitors' firms DG Legal, ACS:Law and Gallant Macmillan among recent victims. The latter, interestingly, appears to have been too strong to knock offline.

There is, of course, an oft-overlooked voice in the music industry that Rich Huxley pointed out.

Huxley, as is most likely with other artists paving new forms of distribution, says: "There has never been a better time to be an enterprising musician," adding: "I am part of the music industries and I want representation."

His point: "There's no way to stop sharing and we shouldn't be striving to do so. That it takes place on the internet just means that in some ways it's track-able and identifiable.

"It's useless and impossible to enforce anti-sharing laws as it's always been the case that humankind finds another way. If sharing music online becomes illegal then people will revert to DVD/hard-drive sharing or find untraceable ways of continuing to to share. Maybe we'll swap CDs with our friends again? Maybe we'll borrow from libraries. To blame the internet is to blame the medium. To quote Steve Lawson 'It's like blaming Microsoft Excel for tax fraud'."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/oct/14/gene-simmons-anonymous-attack-filesharing