Can we host the old Phatnoise Forums on phatnoise.org?

[Firefox]

I know someone took a backup of the old official Phatnoise forums. There was a wealth of info/advice in there.

With official support for the Phatnoise products seemingly fading fast do you think we can start hosting that backup online somehere? e.g. on VorTechS phatnoise.org ??

Any thoughts?

[VorTechS]

I'm not sure how we'd get the info into the current PhatNoise.org forums, I guess some kind of data conversion tool.

The site software I'm using is able to convert forums, so I could create a temporary site - do some data manipulation then copy stuff about.  It might be easier to just extract really useful stuff and create a set of FAQ pages though...

Oh, and I didn't mean for those forums to take off either!  The welcome message on the site does explicitly say 'we'd recommend you try our friends here' but I don't think anyone has really read it

[judb]

I have the backup of the forums and phatnoise denied our request for rehosting the content of the forums saying it would not grant us a royalty free license for their claim of copyright on the content of the forums.

As for the other forums, I don't know what you are talking about. seriously though, the phathack name was one that avoided the trademark of phatnoise.. which is useful when setting up a site that you dont want to get sued for ...  some companies, especially ones that have a dwindling product line tend to turn to legal means for extracting revenue and having phatnoise in the name and having software / discussions around their products becomes a lot harder to justify not being sued.

[VorTechS]

Well, I have a clean criminal record so far (that I know of).

If PhatNoise.com comes back online and they start hosting their own content again, then I'll review what's happening with the site I've created.  Chances of that happening?  Who knows....

I think until we have a definate answer to what's happening there at PhatNoise then I think it's safer if we do keep things as they are right now.  One thing seems to be confirmed - they've been dropped from the Harman companies listing.
Harman Consumer UK confirmed this for me after I gave them a call.

I guess we just play a waiting game, unless someone can get some information from deep inside the PhatNoise ranks.

[judb]

I wish that they'd just open the code base if they are not going to keep operations going.. release PMM as open source code so we can improve it or extract useful stuff from it.. same thing with the player code base, would be nice if they open sourced all the phatbox code except for audible...
i'd like to be able to have an agreement where we can hack boxes but disable audible support on them since I can't give a rats ass about audible support.

I may be paranoid about it but the fact is, we haven't done anything so far that would permit them to sue us that I am aware of and I hope that we wont in the future.

even if they disband phatnoise as a division of harman that doesn't mean harman doesn't own the trademark and patent portfolio and could still sue someone.  on the other hand maybe they sold phatnoise to someone else?  who knows.  maybe everyone left.