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HardOCP Wins Against Infinium Labs
An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has won a huge legal round against Infinium Labs. The WhereIsPhantom website has all the details, straight from the court dockets. There is a list of orders a mile long for Infinium Labs and owner Tim Roberts to comply with by Sept. 30th."
Just in at the courthouse, an order regarding KB Network's Motion to Compel and Motion for Sanctions. Upon review of Plaintiff's Motion, the court finds that the motion should be granted in part and denied in part. Read on for the details...
Judge Kaplan has ordered Infinium Labs to prudce a series of documents by September 30th. These include:
1) "Documents reflecting the identity and location of potential investors, venture capitalists, investors, partners, shareholders to whom private placement memorandums were provided, or other stake or equity holders in Infinium Labs who are located in the state of Texas other than shareholders that acquired Infinium stock on the public market, and the transactions, proposed or consummated with same."
2) "Pleadings and final judgments from any Court of any Jurisdiction in which Timothy Roberts was or is a Defendant between the dates of August 1, 2001 and February 29, 2004; and; the 2003 Tax Return of Timothy Roberts when filed."
3) "All documents in their possession, custody, or control that evidence, reflect, relate to financial transactions (including any beneficial transaction) between Infinium and Roberts from August 2002 to the present, including but not limited to printouts of all bank, credit card, and other financial transactions currently maintained in electronic form."
4) "All emails sent or received by Infinium's Texas employees."
5) "All year-to-date payroll information and records for 2003-2004 for all of Infinium's Texas employees.
6) "All documents reviewed by Kevin Bachus in preparing the declaration submitted in support of Defendant's motion to dismiss that have not otherwise been produced."
7) "All loan documents between Infinium and Roberts, including but not limited to documents pertaining to the $50,000 loan Roberts testified about in his deposition."
8) "All archival data and all forum postings from Infinium's websites."
9) "A complete and unaltered copy of the 'Who's We' agreement."
10) "All Infinium board of directors minutes and resolutions, with the substance of the resolution redacted unless it pertains to Roberts. Defendants are also ordered to make unredacted copies of its board of directors minutes and resolutions available for inspection by Plaintiffs' counsel at the office of Defendants' counsel. Defendants shall make such documents available for inspection on or before September 30, 2004. If, after inspection, Plaintiffs believe that any redacted portions of these documents should be produced, they may seek appropriate relief from the court."
11) "Plaintiffs' may re-depose Infinium and Roberts, with questioning at the second depositions limited to documents and information not produced to Plaintiffs prior to the first depositions. The combined duration of the first and second depositions shall not exceed seven hours per witness. Additionally, at the option of defendants, the depositions may proceed by telephone... . Plantiffs shall pay the costs of the second depositions and each party shall bear its own attorneys' fees. The second depositions shall be completed by November 5, 2004."
Now, once you've digested all that you'll remember that the court also ruled against KB Networks in some parts. That is actually only one item which is: "Plantiffs' request for sanctions is denied."
Analysis
It appears that HardOCP came away with a large victory. Without the transcriptions from the first depositions, we can only speculate based on subsequent motions on what transpired that day. It's quite obvious that the focus is purely on Tim Roberts and following the extensive money trail that has resulted. Section Six is of interest since it's the only one dealing with Kevin Bachus. What did Bachus say (or not say) during his deposition that piqued the interest of Kyle's lawyers?
We now have mention of a $50,000 loan that Roberts testified to in his deposition. What is the significance of this money? Further, will the production of emails, the old website and payroll be enough to prove Infinium can indeed be rightfully sued in Texas?
http://hardocp.com/
HardOCP Vs. Infinium Update:
WhereIsPhantom.com has one of the latest documents filed in our case on-line for you to download and of course gives their thoughts on what IL's lawyers have to say about coverage of the case. To quote the filed motion from IL's attorneys:
Infinium is concerned about the tactics of the Plaintiffs and their lawyers in this case. This case has received an unusual amount of publicity for a case of its type. In fact, Plaintiffs' counsel has issued their own press release announcing the institution of this action and that the Plaintiffs stand behind their negative statements about Infinium and Roberts. Likewise, the plaintiffs run a website called www.hardocp.com wherein they continue to publicize this lawsuit. Additionally, a website has been established called www.whereisphantom.com which "exists for the sole purpose of brining to light as many details as [it] can uncover about Infinium Labs, the lawsuit with KB Networks, and anything else that IL is involved in.
It is my personal opinion that if they did not want this case to be publicized on the Web, they should have not threatened to sue a website multiple times.
Just as a note, all documents that WhereIsPhantom.com posts are a matter of public record. You just have to pay to download them. Sounds like a pretty solid "tactic" to me. Just wait till it gets exciting.
TFA is Slashdotted, but there's a small news article at HardOCP if you're interested.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Well, to be fair, I didn't expect this to show up on the front page of Slashdot either. We're just a two-bit operation over at Whereisphantom.com trying to bring the truth to light.
It didn't make it to this article, but four employees quit yesterday from Infinium Labs for various reasons including a late paycheck. The Sarasota office is expected to close (the one with the $300,000 sign) and all operations move to Seattle. There'll be more tomorrow I promise. (And hopefully that'll include more bandwidth.)
This should be of intrest
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They posted an "expose" on Infinium - shady history of CEO, their "offices" being nonexistant, their shady employees, etc etc. Infinium threatened to sue, sent them a C&D, so HardOCP sued them to get a statement from the court saying they are in the clear and legal and not committing libel/slander
For some background information you might want to check back to these past articles.
[H]ard OCP posted a review of the phantom console detailing Phantoms liberal use of Hot glue in its construction and the lack of appeal of a subscription based console among other things. http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjU3 Also [H]ardOCP posted an editorial about the failed history of other ventures that the CEO of Infinium Labs, Timothy M. Roberts, has attempted. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEyLDE= This during the time when Infinium Labs was (and still is) attempting to raise capitol to start production of the Phantom. Understandably Infinium Labs sued [H]ardOCP for slander.
HardOCP is a gaming website. Last year, they ran an article questioning the Infinium Phantom Console which had been announced, but no one had yet seen.
The article did some probing into the company, and some of their claims, such as the history of the president of Infinium.
Infinium stated they would sue HardOCP over the letter, and sent e-mail to tell HardOCP to change or remove parts of the article. HardOCP didn't cave, and so, there was a lawsuit, and now it's progressed to this (which isn't really a win).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You should have included all of the previous Slashdot coverage of Infinium's and HardOCP's quarrells.
They don't work because by the time somebody posts a Coral link, the site is already down.
Coral is a cacheing solution; unless it can get a copy of the site to cache it, it can't serve it up.
This is why Coral needs to be used beforehand (IE, in the slashdot post) in order to be of any use. And even then, it works best on sites that have relative URLs on the images.
A suggestion to the owner of said site: Coralize as much of your site as you can, and enable HTTP compression (mod_gzip, mod_deflate, IIS6's compression, etc) for whatever else you can. With all that combined even a home connection should be able to handle a slashdotting.
In my original submission, I spread the love around a bit. In all honesty, I'd rather be slashdotted to kingdom come and have the word get around, rather than have the site up and running and no one paying attention.
Just be sure to come back later and visit. We've got over 200 articles covering the entire saga from beginning to end. The tale includes money trails, court intrigue, drugs, hackers and phreakers... you just can't make this stuff up.
Are you a shill, or do you honestly not know the history?
[H] simply called bullshit on IL's claims about the phantom. IL responded in the fashion that Mark Felchstain, Spammer Lawyer, would be proud of: a SLAPP suit. That kind of garbage sure justifies the "dick up [Kyle's] ass." You don't see that kind of crap lawsuit flying around whenever someone makes a crack about DNF.
It's probably been a while since you've read the original article, but you messed up on a fact or two. I'm not picking on you. I just believe facts are important, and when someone inadvertently misses a few details, we can easily clear it up by checking the facts. ...hell their stated office address at the time was a vacant rundown store!
In actuality, the address was a Mailboxes Etc mailbox. The vacant storefront just happened to be in the same strip mall, thus the initial confusion.
Another fact that you got wrong is that Kyle didn't counter sue, he sued pre-emptively (justifiably, imo) after receiving various legal threats. Read about it here.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Look, I don't know if you have thought about it from this angle or not, but Kyle was doing something to protect not only the gaming industry, but also potential investors.
When that article was posted 12 months ago, Infinium had burned through several million dollars in venture capital with nothing to show but some renders and a glossy page of marketing lingo. They were "quite anxious" to get their hands on another 25-50 million US dollars. And it was pretty evident to those who were trying to get info on the console that- not only was it vaporware, it was vaporware hawked by a guy with a really shady history of business dealings.
Kyle's article, while written in a sophomoric style, was very enlightening. It was truthful and Infinium's complaint is that it chased away potential investors. Damn right it it did, and rightfully so!