ZeniMax may seek court order to halt sales of current Oculus Rift headsets!

R3D

http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14478258/zenimax-oculus-injunction

For those that haven't heard. Zenimax has been going after Occulus, Carmack and Luckey for the past few years under the allegation that they stole proprietary code/resources before they joined Oculus.

Earlier this week Oculus lost a trial, admitting that Luckey broke NDAs and Facebook (Parent company of Oculus) is forced to pay the fine of $500 million.

Now it looks like further proceedings are coming to light with Zenimax proposing that Carmack knowingly stole and destroy evidence of his betrayal.

A quote from the attached article:

(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;

This could potentially be a big hit to the VR industry.

Carmack has put out a lengthy public facebook post denying all allegations.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1913546895546485&id=100006735798590

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.

Lt_Commander

What a mess all-around. I'm hoping it's more of a short term setback for VR on the whole, but halting sales of headsets would definitely be bad for the medium right now. Hopefully Zenimax doesn't burn down a viable product/damage the industry to get back at a company for a nasty employee split.

[Deleted User]

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R3D

update from zenimax via http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/290678/Zenimax_vs_Oculus_Carmack_denies_allegations_slams_expert_analysis.php

Zenimax has responded to Carmack's criticisms, and has offered the following statement to Gamasutra: "In addition to expert testimony finding both literal and non-literal copying, Oculus programmers themselves admitted using Zenimax’s copyrighted code (one saying he cut and pasted it into the Oculus SDK), and [Oculus VR co-founder] Brendan Iribe, in writing, requested a license for the 'source code shared by Carmack' they needed for the Oculus Rift. Not surprisingly, the jury found Zenimax code copyrights were infringed. The Oculus Rift was built on a foundation of Zenimax technology." "As for the denial of wiping, the Court’s independent expert found 92 percent of Carmack’s hard drive was wiped—all data was permanently destroyed, right after Carmack got notice of the lawsuit, and that his affidavit denying the wiping was false. Those are the hard facts."

thomasp

as for the claim that this suit is damaging to the VR industry as a whole i am wondering what the market share of oculus might be these days? they were obviously the pioneers and i have an earlier dev unit of theirs here but in the last year or more all i've heard about is the vive as the system to beat (and PS VR for mass market).


i liked the carmack quote from the trial as reported here: http://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-oculus-zenimax-oath/

‘I Am Not A Mac User Unless Under Duress’

should make for a popular print for t-shirts. perhaps this way they can offset the fines?