KISS frontman on P2P: “Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars.”

The RIAA filed 18,000 to 20,000 legal actions; multiply that by every last American P2P user and the bill would be astonishing. The only two cases to proceed through a trial to a verdict have now been tied up in retrials and appeals, a ferociously expensive and laborious process that simply doesn't scale well.

No worries, says Simmons, who obviously sees himself as quite the wheeler-dealer. "Business is my crack," he declared. "That's what motivates me. Getting up every day and doing deals." And so he offered parables to back his logic.

The captain and the fox

"There's a ship that goes across the water," Simmons explained. "The captain is up there and some guy comes up in a sailor suit and says 'Captain! Captain! We have a hole'."

"Well, how big is the hole?" the captain asks.

"Well it's only yea big," the 'guy in the sailor suit' (presumably a sailor) replies. "We'll probably only get in a whole day a glass of water."

"Well," Simmons concluded, "this moron is either going to say don't worry about it, or he's going to plug up that hole then and there." Otherwise: "By the end of that journey that ship will sink."

In case this story didn't clinch the point for Simmons' audience, he rolled out the sad tale of the farmer and the fox.

Once upon a time, he explained, there was a farmer, who noticed that a baby fox was taking an egg from the chicken coop.

The farmer couldn't kill it; the fox was too cute.

"But that little fox went back with a free egg," Simmons warned, "and told all the other little foxes about it, and then the foxes overran the farm, killed all the chickens, took all the eggs, and didn't pay for it."

"Now the farmer lost his farm. His wife divorced him and went with another farmer who was smarter. The kids ran off because the spineless farmer didn't have enough sense to kill the fox. The trucks that delivered the chickens—they're all out of business. The stores that sold them—they're out of business."

"Why?" Simmons declared. "Because of one goddamn cute little fox. So don't let any cute little foxes get near your henhouse!"

And if they do, sue the bastards.