On May 1st, 2014, ZeniMax, who owns id Software and Bethesda Softworks, sued Oculus VR, claiming that it had some ownership of their virtual reality technology. This accusation occurred about a month after Facebook announced that they were acquiring Oculus for $2 billion USD. At least part of their claim was due to work that John Carmack did before he left id Software the year prior, in August 2013.
Today, a North Texas jury awarded ZeniMax $500 million USD from Oculus. This figure is broken down as follows: $300 million against Oculus as a company, $50 million against Palmer Luckey as an individual, and $150 million against Brendan Iribe as an individual. The jury found John Carmack wasn’t responsible for any damages as an individual, so he’s clear of this whole issue.
Oculus and Facebook plan to appeal their judgments.
According to this decision, the jury believes that ZeniMax has some ownership over Oculus’ trademark and source code copyrights. They also believe that, again, according to the verdict, which is hosted by Ars Technica, Oculus violated a non-disclosure agreement that caused $200,000,000 in damages to ZeniMax, but will not continue to damage the company in the future. (See the few pages before Page 49, inclusive.) The personal judgments against Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe are due to the pair not acknowledging ZeniMax’s contributions to Oculus.
Update (February 2nd @ 12:30pm EST): As pointed out in the comments, that was an old tweet from 2014. I just came across it and somehow missed the date stamp. My mistake!
After this decision, John Carmack tweeted:
No work I have ever done has been patented. Zenimax owns the code that I wrote, but they don't own VR.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) May 1, 2014
As always, lots of things can change during the appeals process. For now, it looks like both ZeniMax and John Carmack received a little vindication, though.
Fuck facebook
Fuck facebook
fuck social media
fuck social media
Sucks Zenimax got screwed by
Sucks Zenimax got screwed by a guy with a porn name.
North Texas, I’d watch out
North Texas, I’d watch out during any appeals process because of where ZeniMax filed the lawsuit. Texas where the trolls go to patent troll!
Facebook will never get any of my business, nasty ad pushers!
You’re thinking of East
You're thinking of East Texas. North Texas is up surrounding Dallas, likely because of where id Software is located.
Any part of Texas is bad for
Any part of Texas is bad for that type of thing. And ID software is not the parent company it’s ZeniMax. They only know crony capitalism and they do not have any any sense of what fair markets are about.
P.S. Please do a review of LibreOffice 5.3 and see if it defaults to that Ribbon style interface as default, because I’m not going to try it if I can not get the same interface that is in the LO 5.1 that I’m currently using. I’ll have none of that Ribbon moron UI nonsense!
Not sure about a review, but
Not sure about a review, but I use LibreOffice for all my work at PC Perspective. Haven't bought Microsoft Office since 2010, now that I'm technically using it commercially.
“After this decision, John
“After this decision, John Carmack tweeted”
Impressive he managed to travel back in time nearly two years to do so!
Crap. Fixed.
Crap. Fixed.
Good lord, another
Good lord, another non-technical jury making absurd awards. Oculus isn’t even turning a profit.
Apparently Zuckerberg thinks
Apparently Zuckerberg thinks their IP is worth a few billion. He should have checked with you first.