Game Informer “Legal Threat” to Rock, Paper, Shotgun After Blog Crops Off Tomb Raider Watermarks

US gaming magazine Game Informer has sent a “legal threat” to UK-based gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun for posting images of the upcoming Tomb Raider without GI‘s watermark.

Yesterday, RPS‘ John Walker wrote a post titled “Tomb Raider Screens Locked In A Cupboard” complaining about images of games being exclusively given to certain publications. In it he said that “games aren’t a special secret, they’re a commercial product” and noted that “the tedious drip-drip-drip of information [...] is all advertising.”

Walker complained that the images had only been given to Game Informer (which he called “albeit splendid”) and said: “I’ve chopped off the logos from four of them and made them RPS size because THAT WILL SHOW THEM.”

Walker said:

It’s a bit like Nike announcing a new trainer, but insisting only one man is allowed to know what they look like, but he can tell his friends, so long as they promise not to take any photos. IT’S STUPID. STOP IT.

In seeing this, Game Informer editor executive editor Andrew Reiner mistakenly tweeted at an RPS reader who posted a link to the article asking him to: “Please remove those images or we’ll seek legal action.”

RPS then received a legal notice and have since replaced all the Tomb Raider images with various public domain pictures.

RPS notes how “if you want to see the screenshots, they’ve been reposted without politely cropping them down so they’re inferior and suggesting the original site is a better place to see them, all over the place.”