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Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

variety.com

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Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#101

Post by Jerry2 »

This is a very interesting part: [0]

>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.

[0] http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14478258/zenimax-oculus-inju...

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#102

Post by k-t »

blazespin wrote: post #78
aresant wrote: post #44

If the original complaint is to be believed(1) - which Juror's found credible -the course of events, tldr was something like this: - Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009. - Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013. - Carmack was enthralled with VR. - Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try. - Carmac…

Did the juror agree to all of the line items there?

No. The jury specifically rejected the claims of misappropriated trade secrets, which was the main thrust of Zenimax's argument.

The damages break down to $50M for copyright infringement, $200M for failing to comply with the NDA, and $250M for false designation.

While I personally believe they did break the NDA by showing the hardware with the demo Carmack cooked up, the amount of money awarded is beyond absurd.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#103

Post by samfisher83 »

dvdcxn wrote: post #19

>John Carmack, Oculus chief technology officer and founder of a company owned by ZeniMax, improved on the device using his knowledge from his previous work as a ZeniMax employee. That's a scary precedent...

He did the work on company time. Thats a big no no. This is isn't some young kid, but a grown man.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#104

Post by k-t »

teej wrote: post #73
spatulon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is personally out $150m, according to the article.

The Variety article says Carmack but the TechCrunch article says Iribe. I'm having trouble finding the actual source.

The court documents say Iribe.

Carmack took his emails with him on a USB stick (which Zenimax's lawyer called "10,000 confidential documents") but the jury didn't award any damages for that.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#105

Post by jfoutz »

pzxc wrote: post #92
funnyfacts365 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offtopic but, why do people feel it's alright to refer to the article as The Fucking Article and on some other stuff they get all mad because someone used a curse word? The HN crowd is bipolar...

TFA stands for The Featured Article and always has, though I can understand your misapprehension because of RTFM which does use F as you suggest.

But remember to use fine if anybody important asks.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#106

Post by sfifs »

daenz wrote: post #55
aresant wrote: post #44

If the original complaint is to be believed(1) - which Juror's found credible -the course of events, tldr was something like this: - Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009. - Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013. - Carmack was enthralled with VR. - Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try. - Carmac…

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.

> What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources?

The same thing he was doing when starting Id software working for another company a couple of decades ago.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#107

Post by nl »

daenz wrote: post #55
aresant wrote: post #44

If the original complaint is to be believed(1) - which Juror's found credible -the course of events, tldr was something like this: - Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009. - Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013. - Carmack was enthralled with VR. - Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try. - Carmac…

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.

Read the stories about how he wanted to work on the Occulus version of Minecraft, and how focused he was on making sure he could do that. There didn't appear to be much caution there, either.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#108

Post by cma »

JohnDotAwesome wrote: post #65
daenz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.

There's a story in Masters of Doom where Carmack and Romero do just that. If I recall correctly, they would take company (Softdisk I believe) computers at night because they were more powerful than their home computers, and use them to develop their own games. I think they even worked on their own games on company time. I might be getting the details wrong on that one, but sounds like Carmack dgaf (or just doesn't th…

I believe they settled it by paying some royalties on Commander Keen.

A lot of times Carmack just wants to get shit done. At Oculus he has worked on both the Minecraft code and the Netflix code both for VR clients, both (I believe, I know for sure for Minecraft at least from some talks) with MS and Netflix retaining full ownership of the code.

Maybe they have some "off the record" agreements to avoid anti-trust--Minecraft still hasn't officially come to Vive.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#109

Post by rasz_pl »

pipio21 wrote: post #57
dkonofalski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was the prototype itself that was barely functioning, it was the software side that wasn't great. I remember when Palmer first showed off the device, it seemed to track just fine. When they introduced actual content, though, it became disorienting really quickly. I backed them on Kickstarter so I got to see the DevKit1, DK2, and the CV1. The difference between the early versions and the end versions…

"That being said, it makes me laugh a little to see that Valve and the HTC Vive managed to outpace Oculus." It was the other way around. Valve had been working in VR for years before the first oculus prototype. Oculus contacted Steam and copied the tech they had. The Steam guys actually helped Luckey because it was the small guy doing the open source thing. They did not take into account the selloff to facebook of al…

This is simply not true. Valve had precisely ZERO VR research up until 2012. Thats when they finally decided to pursue hardware and hired Jeri Ellsworth to build hardware division.

Re: Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

#110

Post by deelowe »

Zooper wrote: post #85
daenz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.

I love how it's assumed, taken as axiom, instead of absurdity, that it's even possible for a company to own a individual's time and mind by contract.

John was able to do the demo at E3 due to his employment at Zenimax, Carmack used company resources to work on the product, and Carmack was able to source talent from zenimax due to his employment at the company.

None of this has anything to do with Zenimax owning his "mind" or "time." It's about Carmack using company resources to enable Oculus. This becomes even more concerning when you consider that Carmack was one of their most senior, if not THE most senior engineer at the company. He's compensated handsomely under the assumption that any great ideas he has will end up with the company. This is similar to executive compensation strategies and carries with it very similar assumptions. The situation is a little more than some ordinary employee exploring their hobby and getting lucky.

This is like a CEO getting hired, being awarded a multi-hundred million dollar contract, not doing a single thing for the company that hired him, advertising for a competitor, leaving once his contract is up and also convincing numerous other executives to leave with him at the same time. That's extremely unethical in my opinion.

How much all that is worth is debatable, but the court seems to think it was worth $500M.

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