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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."
And that website is as non-existant as the console.
one of the hardest to read sites I've seen.
They need to lose the fine horizontal lines.
Or maybe I need to get my eyes tested...
Infineon got smacked down for price fixing its chips.
Not a good week for Infin*.
Anyone got a link that works? The phantom site seems to have disappeared into thin air.
Do you mean, "Where is website?"
404 Not Found
Infinium is a bit like a scab, if you pick at it it'll only get worse.
Isn't this company/product the original vapor ware. Comments... Even the website is vapor.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
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.
Nobody's going to visit HardOCP for a while. :)
Isn't that what Infinium wanted?
TFA is Slashdotted, but there's a small news article at HardOCP if you're interested.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I like [H]ard OCP because they stay true to their roots and post mostly about motherboards and stories interesting to the [H]ardware community while other hardware sites are now posting useless reviews of webcams, PDA's and wireless routers which have little to do with making your game machine be all it can be.(anandtech and tomshardwareguide).
Why are these two in court exactly? It would be nice to provide some basic background for those of us out there who don't religiously follow HardOCP.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
For some background information you might want to check back to these past articles.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14577 Damn I hope that company dies.
You know, I am not one to generally criticize Slashdot for it's mistakes, dupes, slant or whatever. It is what it is. I just wish that the posters or the editors would give just a little background on the stories submitted, even if it is just a review from the last time it was discussed.
There are people on this forum with a great deal of different backgrounds that may not always be familiar with the names, companies, and situations involved in stories that might interest a causal reader, without him or her having to dig up research just to know what the story is even about.
Kudos also to HardOCP for not running scared when faced with legal threats. If more of the "little guys" were able to stand strong against frivolous or iffy strong-armed legal challenges, the world might not be perfect but we'd be headed in a better direction.
3D Realms threatens to sue the next person to compare them to Infinium.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Forgot to mention HardOCP actually DOES open the thing up. Its just a p4 with all the cards connected to the back with hot glue.
-Foxxz
HardOCP won a battle against infinium in court.
Ok whats the battle about?
stolen from CNN
(CNN) -- A few weeks ago a new game console was unveiled on the Web called Phantom.
Its developer, Infinium Labs, promises it will be the "must-have high performance game console," and that the Phantom will provide "more access to more games of every genre than any competing product," all "with blazing speed."
Six months ago, it was only a rumor among hardcore gamers. In fact, it seemed Phantom was, as the American Heritage dictionary put it, "an image that appears only in the mind; an illusion."
The juiciest rumor was that there never would be a console called Phantom. The conspiracy theory went that the whole thing was a hoax, concocted as a PR stunt.
Looks like Hardocp called bullshit and now a judge is agreeing with them and infinium is getting slapped.
now read on...
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
No I think the system would fail 1) becuase the world does NOT need another console (and I challenge anyone to prove to me that consumers have been crying for another system) 2) because of its shit content delivery system (do we really want this, really? Most people want their games on media if for no other reason than to trade the crap/old games for credit at a store) 3) because people love an underdog, unless ofcourse, it's a boastful, litigious, ill-conceived underdog in which case you could sell tickets for front row seats to an exclusive showing of its spectacular and fiery failure. I personally can't wait for this thing to end in a smoldering ruin and bring shame upon everyone involved. Even if it is a good idea my wallet only allows for so many good ideas.
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.
I wonder how these lawsuits are going to look in their planned filing with the American Stock Exchange?
Get off my launchpad!
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.
originally the unit was "demo'd" nearly 2 years ago...it was nearly 1 year of vapor before kyle ripped on it...and the guy hawking it is still getting VC funding!!! WTF It's a failed business right from the start...any /.r would recognize that from the start... but when a pro starts hawking "computer", "broadband", "pay per play", "Secure" and such terms the VCs still see the $$ no matter how logic seems to fail the situation!!
You know what, no matter how many times you rant in this thread about the "hachet job", everything HardOCP posted is true about Infinium and the CEO.
Was it in strong? Yes. Was it perhaps a bit tactless? Yes. Was it all true and provable? Yes.
Oh, and when you threaten someone, except the possibility of getting sued. Most companies and people do not take legal threats lightly.
The reason why they are so nasty to each other is because HardOCP originally ran a piece calling bullshit against Infinuim. That in it of itself is not "having a dick up one's ass". That is just a little journalism. What happened next was that Infinium then said that they were going to sue if HardOCP didn't get rid of the story. Now, it is true the American thing to do is to sue when someone pisses you off. However, it is also very much the American thing to tell someone who is being an ass to go fuck themselves and continue to piss them off just out of spite. Hence you the posting you see today today.
All of that said, I have a great deal of respect for HardOCP. People throw threaten lawsuits over dumb shit like this too often. It is nice to see someone punch these fuckers back.
Here's a fun idea.
1. get a linux system together with some good hardware. Make it mini-itx
2. Take out all non-game-console-specific stuff out. Make it a small distro
3. Buy a game controller from the store, get drivers working for it
4. Setup some crude kiosk frontend that might be what the Phantom would have
5. Install MAME on it or something and pretend the arcade ROMs ae the games Phantom would be selling(this is just an example)
6. Put a fancy plastic case around it.
Then realize you have some crude implmentation of what might have been a Phantom console, only for the cost of hardware, and people's free time to slap together a fancy front end with a Linux engine(not unlike TiVo)
7. wait for lawsuits from Infinium labs to roll in saying you copied their idea
8. brag about it on here and HardOCP. They have a plastic box and hype, you have a somewhat crude , working implementation of what they have promised, but never delivered.
Whee
I should have cited the original comment where I got this from:
s ho ld=1&commentsort=3&tid=124&mode=thread&cid=1018654 6
/. colors on all pages" check box in our prefs...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=120887&thre
This trick was originally posted by tqft (619476), but tqft cited Jesse Rudderman (Moz/FF/etc guy) as the original source.
Now if taco (or some outsource programmer in Mumbai) could just get us a nice little "use normal
Has anyone else been getting spam promoting the purchase of infinium labs stock? Too lazy to look for one of them, but its on one of those non sec stock markets.
Has infinium turned into one of those fake boilerroom companies, with some people trying to cash out real quick?
Once they released the specs for that box it seemed pretty obvious that it was just a scan to pull in a few extra VC dollars. All this time with nary a peep coupled with [H]ard ops investigative work and the cover is revealed. In allot of ways the Internet *is* the great equalizer.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
It would seem that you
/. readers oppose en masse, and perhaps the reason those things are opposed is that advancing those few bad technologies makes advancing the rest of the good ones bad. IMO the DRM people are more the Luddites since they essentially need to make computers illegal to protect their content.
have adopted someting of a Luddite mentality. It
is people such as yourself which impede technical
progress. Subscription based software delivery
via high-speed data pipes *is* the future.
I doubt there are any true "Luddites" on slashdot. Opposing some kinds of technology does not make you a Luddite. Opposing all kinds of technology does. There are very few technological things that
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Duke Nukem Forever ...
It's like a modern-day "which came first?"
HardOCP is one of the largest hardware sites on the net, and generates over six figures of revenue a year. They aren't exactly your sister's personal website.
..right when this whole feud started. They seemed like nice enough people. The were set up in temp offices in Seattle's bank of America building. Most of the PMs are ex-Microsoft (No MS jokes please, we are torching IL right now...) and at the time they were looking to hire a ton of people. They had the hardware done (Although I never saw it, being a first interiew), and were looking at the software delivery system. The ranking manager came off as a bit odd, but I didn't get and sense of shysters trying to pull a fast one or clueless idiots who couldn't pull it off. If all the negative press about the president being totally evil/inept isn't true, I'd give the console a fifty percent chance of seeing the light of day.
The guys I talked to even thought that PA's shot at them was funny, so they have a sense of humor about all the press. I'm sort of glad I wasn't offered a job, though. Too much wierd stuff was happening.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I saw the Phantom at E3 2004. Played it for a little bit. I've never seen a system get that much of a poor reception anywhere, ever, by anyone. It was funny as hell to see them try to explain it crashing so much and they wouldn't show us the "cool things it could do" that they kept talking about. They did have the biggest individual booth of the show, though. Maybe they thought gamers had no standards?
John Pippin - Managing Editor, PsxNation.com
Well, IL (an unknown company at the time) made some big claims about their product. But the whole operation was shrouded in mystery and no-one seemed to know what was going on. So [H] did some investigating, and found out some "interesting" stuff. End result was that IL sued them.
Why did [H] write an article about IL? because they made huge claims and people were interested, that's why.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
What is amazing? Infinium threatened legal action, and HardOCP responded in kind. This is what you should expect if you threaten to sue someone. Mmmkay?
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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!
Phantom website
Infinium Labs, Inc. was founded by a management team...
That's all I need to hear.
Originally Tim Roberts intended to bilk a bunch of investors by pretending to create a gaming console, spending the money, then getting out of dodge. As HardOCP has pointed out, he's done that before.
However, the online gaming community took notice and started asking real questions, e.g., where is an actual product? What companies will actually be writing games? Etc.
Suddenly Roberts had to prove to the investors, and to future investors that the console was real, so he was forced to hire Kevin Bachus, former Microsoft Xbox employee. And worse of all for Roberts, he was actually forced to create a real product.
Now that the online gaming community has put Roberts in a spotlight, he is no longer free to lurk in the dark. Now he's forced to either admit it was a scam or to go forward and fail with an asinine business plan. Mmmm... I wonder what he'll do?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
That's quite a stretch, CowboyNeal, somehow turning "This Account Has Been Suspended / Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible." into "HardOCP Wins BIG against Infinium Labs". Maybe I don't have the right one-time encryption pad?
You are talking total shit.
He did what many many journalists would do and investigated.
I suggest you go learn about good journalism.
I, for one, applaud what he's done.
Here's the link to the orignal HardOCP article detailing their investigation.
Link to Original HardOCP article
This looks a good piece of investigative journalism by a website. Kudos to them for providing the public an unbiased set of facts.
The Internet has no garbage collection
It seems that HardOCP has a mirror of the wherisphantom site up now..
Place sig here.
- It costs $30 US / month to play, PLUS any fees for games you want to play on it.
-
Multiplayer, if present, is online only, unlike other consoles, which allow you to play with friends
- It has no "killer app" games, it only runs PC games...
- ...but not PC games you already own. Oh no, you need to buy them again
-
Although it is a PC, you cannot upgrade it. (Although this is true of any console, such as X-Box, you will continue to get games tweaked for the console. Not so here, new games for the phantom will continue to have higher and higher requirements, and will not be optimized)
-
You don't install the games, they all stream from the IL server
-
Even if your games are cached, you still need to authenticate with the IL server
-
If your internet connection goes down, you cannot play games.
-
Regardless of their claims, I don't see how they can possible stream such large games in the background as you play them. As Tom's Hardware pointed out, most games have all of their music and such in one big file, and it is quite difficult to only select the stuff you need for the current level
Want a good point? If you can hack the DRM, you can get a pretty sweet Linux box for $199. Athlon XP 2500+, 256 MB DDR RAM, GeForce 5700 PRO, 40 gb HD. But even if they sell millions as a result of this, it will still go bad, because I bet they are eating a loss and hoping to make it back on subscriptions (And so will probably be quick to DMCA any hint of hacking it)ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Somehow I don't think that VC's losing 10-25 million dollars is quite on the same level as thousands of employees and investors losing billions upon billions of dollars.
I don't want to say that the VC's who stand to lose their money on IL deserve what's coming, but they at least know (or at least should know) the risk of being a VC, especially when you are investing in a new company and haven't done any research on them. I am surprised that people will invest millions on a company without doing the research that HardOCP did, and I can't really feel sorry for those who did.
Enron investors, on the other hand, were investing because they were employees of what they thought was a successful company and/or they believed all the documents that the company was filing with the SEC and the NYSE. To make matters worse, they were also misled (deliberately, in some cases) by their financial advisors, who were also looking to make a profit on the whole ordeal.
Bottom line, while this is an unfortunate situation for the VC's who invested in IL, it is by no means even remotely comparable to the whole Enron debacle.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
If they are truly hucksters they won't meet a product launch date!
There was no commercial gain from this journalism worth the risk of getting it all wrong and making enemies of future industry players.
It's good to see this sort of questioning in the games industry. Often journalists write trite fawning nonsense or rehash press releases.