Bethesda parent company zenimax awarded $500 million in oculus lawsuit

[Dohc-WP]

A Texas jury has awarded ZeniMax $500 million in its suit against Oculus.

As reported by Polygon, the jury found that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey violated the terms of a non-disclosure agreement, but that Oculus "did not misappropriate trade secrets as contended by ZeniMax."

In closing arguments prior to today's decision, ZeniMax lawyer Anthony Sammi argued that ZeniMax should have been given $2 billion, plus another $2 billion in punitive damages. Oculus attorney Beth Wilkinson contended that the lawsuit "was driven by ZeniMax’s embarrassment, jealousy and anger, not facts," according to Polygon.

John Carmack and Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe were named as defendants in the case in August.

Facebook claimed the suit was a response to ZeniMax having passed on its own chance to acquire Oculus. Both Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey took the stand during the case.

Zuckerberg said the case against his company showed a common occurrence in which people "come out of the woodwork and claim that they just own some portion of the deal."

ZeniMax's claim against Facebook and Oculus stemmed from accusations that Carmack, who worked at ZeniMax previous to moving to Oculus, returned to ZeniMax and took code and a tool used for developing VR, something Carmack denied.

Source: IGN

 

[Dohc-WP]

UPDATE: ZeniMax may seek an injunction to prevent Facebook and Oculus from selling the Oculus Rift.

"We will consider what further steps we need to take to ensure there will be no ongoing use of our misappropriated technology, including by seeking an injunction to restrain Oculus and Facebook from their ongoing use of computer code that the jury found infringed ZeniMax’s copyrights," a ZeniMax spokesperson told IGN.

Zenimax provided the following full statement:

"We are pleased that the jury in our case in the U.S. District Court in Dallas has awarded ZeniMax $500,000,000 for Defendants’ unlawful infringement of our copyrights and trademarks, and for the violation of our non-disclosure agreement with Oculus pursuant to which we shared breakthrough VR technology that we had developed and that we exclusively own. In addition, the jury upheld our complaint regarding the theft by John Carmack of RAGE source code and thousands of electronic files on a USB storage device which contained ZeniMax VR technology. While we regret we had to litigate in order to vindicate our rights, it was necessary to take a stand against companies that engage in illegal activity in their desire to get control of new, valuable technology.

The liability of Defendants was established by uncontradicted evidence presented by ZeniMax, including (i) the breakthrough in VR technology occurred in March 2012 at id Software through the research efforts of our former employee John Carmack (work that ZeniMax owns) before we ever had contact with the other defendants; (ii) we shared this VR technology with the defendants under a non-disclosure agreement that expressly stated all the technology was owned by ZeniMax; (iii) the four founders of Oculus had no expertise or even backgrounds in VR—other than Palmer Luckey who could not code the software that was the key to solving the issues of VR; (iv) there was a documented stream of computer code and other technical assistance flowing from ZeniMax to Oculus over the next 6 months; (v) Oculus in writing acknowledged getting critical source code from ZeniMax; (vi) Carmack intentionally destroyed data on his computer after he got notice of this litigation and right after he researched on Google how to wipe a hard drive—and data on other Oculus computers and USB storage devices were similarly deleted (as determined by a court-appointed, independent expert in computer forensics); (vii) when he quit id Software, Carmack admitted he secretly downloaded and stole over 10,000 documents from ZeniMax on a USB storage device, as well as the entire source code to RAGE and the id tech® 5 engine —which Carmack uploaded to his Oculus computer; (viii) Carmack filed an affidavit which the court's expert said was false in denying the destruction of evidence; and (ix) Facebook's lawyers made representations to the court about those same Oculus computers which the court's expert said were inaccurate. Oculus’ response in this case that it didn’t use any code or other assistance it received from ZeniMax was not credible, and is contradicted by the testimony of Oculus programmers (who admitted cutting and pasting ZeniMax code into the Oculus SDK), as well as by expert testimony."

ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman added, “Technology is the foundation of our business and we consider the theft of our intellectual property to be a serious matter. We appreciate the jury’s finding against the defendants, and the award of half a billion dollars in damages for those serious violations.”

 

[mottamort]

If true, that's quite rough stuff....