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Infinium Labs Threatens Gaming News Site
Over the past year or two, Slashdot has run a number of stories about Infinium Labs and their Phantom Game Console (that phrase still makes me smile, every time). I think we've been generous to them, taking their game console talk at more or less face value, despite the vaporous nature of the product. Now they've decided that threats are a better plan for improving their image than producing a real product, and threatened HardOCP over an older news story. Our own Robin Miller has talked to Infinium and written up his impressions of the situation.
What, are they gonna sue Penny Arcade too?
Dude, Whoa
I Hate The Stupid Phantom
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I thought this kind of behavior was reserved for companies that could afford to lose customers or that had an existing customer base. What do they wish to gain? Slander is difficult to pin on someone especially new organizations if you're in the public eye.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
I'm no legal strategist but wouldn't it be smarter for Infinium to actually demo one of these consoles then go after HardOCP for slander/defamation/whatever? Right now it sounds like they don't like the attacks on their vapourware. My idea assumes, naturally, that Infinium actuall has a Phantom console to demo...
Infinium needs to shit or get off the pot (ala SCO)
Trolling is a art,
Sue a well known gaming website.
/Guinness beer dude
BRILLIANT!
We did the same with DNF but 3D Realms never did something like that.
;)
That's maybe why lots of people here still think DNF is not vaporware
Iraq: war to save the U
The next step in their buisness plan is perhaps to do a SCO
How about suing another console vendor for $1 Billion for infringing on IP in their vaporware console?
I preemptively named my software company The Vapour Software Company, so that when people read articles about my late products they just think the writer is mentioning the name of my company again and again. The later my producs, the better the free advertising!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This will be the first console that will have a port of Duke Nukem Forever.
Lackey: Sir, we're not catching enough flies!
President: Very well. Activate the Vinegar Device!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Anyone else here want to short this publicly traded turkey?
Is the VC cash running out? What are they trying to keep "under the radar"? Their CEO at least is making a grand living producing nothing.....is this bad press pissing on their gravy train perhaps?
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
SCO announced today in a press release that they have acquired ownership of Infinium Labs and all rights to the Phantom game console.
In news related to this related news, legal procedings have been initiated against Slashdot, Penny Arcade, and the chick who used to work for Infinium who said something on Slashdot.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
While I have to give props to Roblimo for having the courage to have a bit of satirical fun with this, it almost makes me want to cry to realize that things have gotten this absurd.
Has the business world become so totally detached from reality that they honestly believe that they shouldn't be criticised for something as blatantly bullshit as this? What kind of strange alternate reality is this company living in?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
I have extended HardOCP.com's pledge to correct any and all possible inconsistencies or errors in our editorial entitled "Behind the Phantom Console" personally to Timothy Roberts and Kevin Bachus of Infinium Labs and they have yet to inform HardOCP.com of any information we presented as being not correct. This courtesy was extended on September 17, 2003, the date the article was published and has been extended several times since then with no reply ever being received by HardOCP.com. It is my opinion that Infinium Labs' only interest is stifling HardOCP.com and our opinions. HardOCP.com still stands by our thoughts and opinions put forth in our editorial and no amount of legal badgering and frivolous lawsuits will change those opinions that we have shared with our readers.
_____________________________
Kyle Bennett
Editor-in-Chief @ HardOCP.com
Nice to see they have no intention of rolling over.
I have extended HardOCP.com's pledge to correct any and all possible inconsistencies or errors in our editorial entitled "Behind the Phantom Console" personally to Timothy Roberts and Kevin Bachus of Infinium Labs and they have yet to inform HardOCP.com of any information we presented as being not correct. This courtesy was extended on September 17, 2003, the date the article was published and has been extended several times since then with no reply ever being received by HardOCP.com. It is my opinion that Infinium Labs' only interest is stifling HardOCP.com and our opinions. HardOCP.com still stands by our thoughts and opinions put forth in our editorial and no amount of legal badgering and frivolous lawsuits will change those opinions that we have shared with our readers.
It's good to see a website refusing to be intimidated by spurious legal threats. To often, all it takes is the sound of a lawyer clearing his throat to get a website owner to panic and pull content. Of course, HardOCP is not exactly a two-bit operation, and Infinium Labs is far from a massive corporation, but I'll take my victories where I can. Here's to the free press.
$1,250,100.
Is it just me, or is anyone else wondering about that $100? I mean, $1.25 million is a nice, round number. Easy to remember and deal with, but that $100 extra is some sort of ugly wart at the end.
What is it? A birdbath? Prettier shingles? What honestly adjusts the price of a house by $100?!
----- ----- -----
Just covering my bases...I hate lawyer letters...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Let's see - this person is claiming to be Lyssa Watson but the domain the account links to is registered to Lisa Sabin. Furthermore, no Lyssa Watson has ever been employed at Infinium. Check the history of this account for further proof that this is thinly veiled disinformation in an attempt to gain karma [from moron mods] to further troll activities.
Actually, the HardOCP article is more of an attack on the credibility of the founder of the company. While it's nothing but a listing of hard facts, it paints a very bleak picture of Tim Robert's competence as an entrepreneur. Essentially, it charges that many of the companies he worked for were failures, and the only ones which are still operational (or could at least be contacted) had family members working in high places there. The only exception to this is a company that went IPO a couple of years after he left and then sunk to the point of being threatened with delisting. They basically come out and say that the man is a multi-time loser who has wasted millions of investor dollars and whose business doesn't even have a physical office -- just a bunch of press releases.
As a news organization, HardOCP has a lot going for them in a slander/libel case. The only thing I think which they might be liable on is the implication (not a direct statement) that Tim Roberts being at WorldCom was somehow related to the bankruptcy of WorldCom.
As for the trademark violations, IANAL, so I don't know how liable a news organization can be for using a company's name and logo in a report without their permission. I doubt that they're going to be in any serious trouble, so long as they go back and place "tm's" on everything, but trademark law has surprised me many times before.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The console must also double as a server.
-ashot
Slander regards spoken insults, in print it's called libel. That aside, it isn't libel if it's the truth. So long as nothing HardCOP said was fabricated - it's an open and shut deal. Infinium is just wasting even more time and money not making games.
Why the hell does Infinium labs care now, five months later? If they felt wronged by the story, you'd think they'd have at least demanded a retraction back when it broke. So my guess is that this is the only way they can get back in the headlines anymore. They probably had some press release recently that was passed over by the media - so now they're fighting to be remembered.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
He's got his own console type thing (it seems to be directed at developers, since it's of the "make it yourself" breed not seen in the last 20 years). Try the official site XGameStation
I call shenanigans on this post, namely because:
1) "Macroscale Design" is n't a degree I've heard of, if anything for designing products you'd have a product design degree.
2) You don't do product design in rendering packages like maya and lightwave, more like Solidworks or if you did n't have the cash Rhino3D.
They have no intent to sue. They just hoped that by sending a threatening letter they might get HardOCP to take down an article that might scare away the venture capitalists that they want to extract money from.
anyone else find it humorous that the lawyers who wrote the threat letter are at www.mofo.com ?
After all, Bachus is a seasoned pro [...] in an interview with gamesindustry.biz published January 29, 2004, he said, "I plan to be working in this industry, hopefully at Infinium but if not then somewhere else, for a long time, and ultimately all I have is my credibility."
What, no skill, talent, experience, vision, morality or integrity? That damn journalist must have cut those bits out to save on his word count.
(though, to be fair - from a slashdot editor, I would have expected : 'All I have is my credibilty, and my credibility').
But I would take it even further, following Robin's strategy.
Just remove all articles. Inifinium has produced nothing but laughable trash when it comes to PR anyway and I don't think the gaming industry needs any more from blowhard vaporeware merchants. Don't give these guys any soap box, good bad or otherwise, in which to con venture capitol from anyone else. Especially with the clear lack of respect they have for the online community you would think they would want to entice.
Just make them vanish. I mean jeebus, these were the rocket scientists who couldn't get an online email form to work right - who thinks they can produce a secured broadband game delivery console before Sony and MS swallows up the market?
They want the "truth" to come out? Fine. Let them put a product on the shelves. Until them, just blackball them from the web.
Shouldn't Infinitum Labs be more concerned about, you know, getting some sort of product out on the market? The fact that they're suing seems to prove that the Phantom is nothing more than vaporware. If you have an actual product that's actually going to be worth buying, suing only pisses your customers off. If Infinitum Labs was really worried about the claims made against them, they should try and disprove that information or at least put an optimistic spin on it.
So, to Infinitum Labs, I say this: release your console! At the very least, demonstrate that this isn't some ploy to bilk money out of investors. What's that, Infinitum Labs? You say you can't do that?
Just think if you can fool a few rich people or companies, you too can live in a 3 million dollar home and not have to do any real work!!!!
Scam #1: Start a business in a hot area, get a few componies interested in your idea's. Get investers interested in your company, but telling them how companies are dying to buy your new product. Then sale the company before people realies there is no product and it starts fold.
Scam #2: Tell investers you have a new product idea for a hot market, get them to invest lot's of money. Then pay yourself an outragous salary, until you have used up all the investment. Then say you were a victem of a tough market.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
FTDA was intended to protect famous trademarks from being "diluted" through third-party derivative use. Unfortunately for Infinium, they'd have trouble simply proving their mark is "famous" in the legal sense of the term ("famous" for what? Vapor?). Even worse for them, injunctive relief under FTDA now adheres to an "actual harm" standard (Moseley v. V Secret Catalogue Inc., U.S., No. 01-1015, AKA "that Victoria's Secret case), which Infinium would be hard pressed to show.
Finally, of course, their threat is absolutely meaningless because of the provisions of 15 U.S.C. 1125(c)(4)(C):
Oops. How much they pay for that legal representation again?-Watchful.Babbler (*Still* no freaking password!)
I dunno. With a background like that of Tim Roberts and a product named "Phantom", I'm sure I could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps this was the strategy from the start.
/. IANAL's and IAAL's debunk this particular conspiracy theory. :)
1. Produce hype and raise investment for a product that sounds like, looks like and feels like it's going to be vapourware.
2. Wait until the hordes of enthusiast web sites start labelling the product vapourware.
3. Sue the crap out of one of the smaller, juicier targets on the basis that they're having an financial impact on the product's ongoing development.
4. Rinse, repeat steps 1 and 3 until you've raised so much money you can either a) actually build the product or b) do a runner.
5. Well, profit. =P
Maybe I'm just a little jumpy in this SCO-et-al era. I'm not trying to bait but I would genuinely love to hear some
Can anyone decipher that?
...and does anyone else suspect that this whole ordeal might be a front for the REAL BUSINESS?
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Nicholas Eckert
vidstudent
Anyone trashing Infinium here has not bothered to try out Infiniums offerings themselves. If you lazy asses would go to their web site you'd see that they have produced many great things already, including a really cool logo, an Acrobat PDF file with cool graphics embedded in it, and a kick-ass schweeet streaming video file that has techno beats, flashy words and graphics flying all over the screen, I was was like "Whoa! That logo is cool!" I want to upgrade my connection to T3 so I can download the bigger versions of the promotional versions, and here them in Dolby Surround!
The problem with most lame-ass gamers these days is everyone expects to go to the store and buy a plastic box and you bring it home and plug it in and "play with it", as if pushing buttons and controllling things on the screen really matters. Well that's old thinking. Now days we don't have to hold a gaming system in our hands to appreciate it. We can just download a promotional video clips (that are all free by the way, why pay for games when promotional videos are free?) and it shows you what the system would look like, that is if you wanted a plastic box taking space in your home, but we don't have to actually hold it and play it, do we? No!
Infinium is taking the next bold step into "non-interactive promotional gaming" and all of you are just screwing around wasting money on your Pac-Man ancient history non-promotional I-have-to-hold-it-in-my-hands gaming systems. Losers! All of you! I'm never reading Slashdot again, at least not until I come back to work on Monday, I swear, all weekend no Slashdot!
Good idea Infinium! Now everybody knows about the article you didn't want them to see. Intimidating people into not revealing inconvenient facts only works if you're big enough and ruthless enough to scare the people who have the information into submission. Since you aren't big enough to do that, people are willing to stand up against you - and the information you wanted to keep away from the world is spread about for all to see.
Your response to the article should tell your prospective investors that you're not smart enough to actually deserve their money or to use it wisely.
And yes, it was expensive, but worth it. Price is no object so I ordered the "top of the line" model complete with a Bitboys video card and I even get a certificate to take to the store and pick up my copy of Duke Nukem Forever!! I WIN !
I give up. I can't tell the litigious bastards without a scorecard anymore.
Okay, someone clue me in. Which litigious bastards are we supposed to be angry at now?
These litigious bastards ... ...
these other litigious bastards...
now these litigious bastards
or perhaps (and oldie but a goodie) these litigious bastards
Man, that's going to be an awful lot of HREFs to compile in my posts to talk about anybody on Slashdot anymore.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)