I'm not sure if you crazy kittens have been keeping up with the case (although it's kind of hard to avoid it on the gaming sites), but the mud flinging continues.
Originally, Zenimax was trying to claim $4billion in damages for breaking an NDA in Zenimax's owned coding and technical trickery By a bloke called Luckey Duck, and claimed that John Carmack stole thousands of documents, base code for the iD tech 5 engine as well as other proprietary tools.
The court found that Luckey Duck did break the NDA, but Oculus did not 'misappropriate ZeniMax's trade secrets'
Oculus were ordered to pay $200 million for breaking the NDA, $50 million for 'False Designation' and another $50 million for copyright infringement. Ontop of that, Former CEO and Oculus founder was ordered to pay $150 million for false designation, and Luckey duck must pay another $50 million.
So a nice cold $500 million for Zenimax.
Sounds fair, considering how big Facebook are, and how much the tech could be worth, right? But the court actually found that they didn't steal any of the 'trade secrets', so the entirety of the $500 million is based on damages of breaking an NDA? And what was the breach of the NDA?
Doom 3. The game that had been out for public consumption long before the work on this began, among other things.
Naturally, Oculus state that they're going to appeal the outcome, and on the same day, Zenimax release a statement.
"blah blah 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."
What I find kind of crazy, is that Carmack doesn't know how to format his hard drive. Anywho, Carmack being the loudmouth that he is, took to facebook. (And as someone who has had to testify multiple times in court, WHY POST ANYTHING LEGAL ON SOCIAL MEDIA?!?! Judges yell that at people ALL the time! He obviously knew this was going to be going back to court! Gah! It's rather long, so click the link to read it all)
"The Zenimax vs Oculus trial is over. I disagreed with their characterization, misdirection, and selective omissions. I never tried to hide or wipe any evidence, and all of my data is accounted for, contrary to some stories being spread...
...The exception was the plaintiff’s expert that said Oculus’s implementations of the techniques at issue were “non-literally copied” from the source code I wrote while at Id Software...
...This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo. I was genuinely interested in hearing how the paid expert would spin a web of code DNA between completely unrelated codebases...
...The analogy that the expert gave to the jury was that if someone wrote a book that was basically Harry Potter with the names changed, it would still be copyright infringement. I agree; that is the literary equivalent of changing the variable names when you copy source code. However, if you abstract Harry Potter up a notch or two, you get Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which also maps well onto Star Wars and hundreds of other stories. These are not copyright infringement..."
But the silly bugger forgot, that Oculus programmers had admitted that they had "Cut and pasted code directly into the Oculus SDK."
So, considering that Zenimax gets a cool $500 million, you think they'd happily take that?
Nope. Zenimax has a pending injunction against the sale of all devices reliant on using the code.
“The jury’s damage award here, however substantial, is an insufficient incentive for Defendants to cease infringing... Just minutes after the jury revealed its verdict, Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, publicly stated that the jury’s verdict of a half billion dollars was ‘not material to [Facebook’s] financials.’
The silly woman should have kept her mouth shut.(See what I mean about posting legal s*** online?
)
Now that's still all pending, and Carmack, not one to sit back, decides to have his own shot at suing Zenimax for a measly $22.5 million, as the last unpaid amount of the $150million buyout of iD.
Turns out he had already attempted to pursue millions in damages against his termination of employment, and a bunch of other stuff. But if it's a payment left over from the acquisition of the company, you'd think that it would be completely unrelated to the outcome of the case. (And in Aussie law, it would also be debatable about who legally owns the code, until the final payment is made. But you yanks are crazy with that stuff. I mean, have you seen Carmack's application? It's as if it's written by his mate while they were having a few beers.)
Anywho, what do you kids think? (And Sorry/not sorry for making this super long.)
xo
Originally, Zenimax was trying to claim $4billion in damages for breaking an NDA in Zenimax's owned coding and technical trickery By a bloke called Luckey Duck, and claimed that John Carmack stole thousands of documents, base code for the iD tech 5 engine as well as other proprietary tools.
The court found that Luckey Duck did break the NDA, but Oculus did not 'misappropriate ZeniMax's trade secrets'
Oculus were ordered to pay $200 million for breaking the NDA, $50 million for 'False Designation' and another $50 million for copyright infringement. Ontop of that, Former CEO and Oculus founder was ordered to pay $150 million for false designation, and Luckey duck must pay another $50 million.
So a nice cold $500 million for Zenimax.
Sounds fair, considering how big Facebook are, and how much the tech could be worth, right? But the court actually found that they didn't steal any of the 'trade secrets', so the entirety of the $500 million is based on damages of breaking an NDA? And what was the breach of the NDA?
Doom 3. The game that had been out for public consumption long before the work on this began, among other things.
Naturally, Oculus state that they're going to appeal the outcome, and on the same day, Zenimax release a statement.
"blah blah 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."
What I find kind of crazy, is that Carmack doesn't know how to format his hard drive. Anywho, Carmack being the loudmouth that he is, took to facebook. (And as someone who has had to testify multiple times in court, WHY POST ANYTHING LEGAL ON SOCIAL MEDIA?!?! Judges yell that at people ALL the time! He obviously knew this was going to be going back to court! Gah! It's rather long, so click the link to read it all)
"The Zenimax vs Oculus trial is over. I disagreed with their characterization, misdirection, and selective omissions. I never tried to hide or wipe any evidence, and all of my data is accounted for, contrary to some stories being spread...
...The exception was the plaintiff’s expert that said Oculus’s implementations of the techniques at issue were “non-literally copied” from the source code I wrote while at Id Software...
...This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo. I was genuinely interested in hearing how the paid expert would spin a web of code DNA between completely unrelated codebases...
...The analogy that the expert gave to the jury was that if someone wrote a book that was basically Harry Potter with the names changed, it would still be copyright infringement. I agree; that is the literary equivalent of changing the variable names when you copy source code. However, if you abstract Harry Potter up a notch or two, you get Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, which also maps well onto Star Wars and hundreds of other stories. These are not copyright infringement..."
But the silly bugger forgot, that Oculus programmers had admitted that they had "Cut and pasted code directly into the Oculus SDK."
So, considering that Zenimax gets a cool $500 million, you think they'd happily take that?
Nope. Zenimax has a pending injunction against the sale of all devices reliant on using the code.
“The jury’s damage award here, however substantial, is an insufficient incentive for Defendants to cease infringing... Just minutes after the jury revealed its verdict, Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, publicly stated that the jury’s verdict of a half billion dollars was ‘not material to [Facebook’s] financials.’
The silly woman should have kept her mouth shut.(See what I mean about posting legal s*** online?
)Now that's still all pending, and Carmack, not one to sit back, decides to have his own shot at suing Zenimax for a measly $22.5 million, as the last unpaid amount of the $150million buyout of iD.
Turns out he had already attempted to pursue millions in damages against his termination of employment, and a bunch of other stuff. But if it's a payment left over from the acquisition of the company, you'd think that it would be completely unrelated to the outcome of the case. (And in Aussie law, it would also be debatable about who legally owns the code, until the final payment is made. But you yanks are crazy with that stuff. I mean, have you seen Carmack's application? It's as if it's written by his mate while they were having a few beers.)
Anywho, what do you kids think? (And Sorry/not sorry for making this super long.)
xo
