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Facebook Ordered to Pay $500M in Oculus Lawsuit

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

#131

Post by puranjay »

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.

Honestly, Carmack sounds like he is smitten with VR/Oculus, at least in the earlier videos.

I don't think he was treating this very rationally...it was like love

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

#132

Post by puranjay »

deelowe wrote: post #110
Zooper wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, people are forgetting that Carmack wasn't the janitor at Zeinmax; he was one of the biggest, if not THE biggest reason why Zeinmax acquired ID in the first place

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

#133

Post by psuedonymous »

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…

"Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable."

The HMD was functional before Carmack got involved. For example, Hunger in Los Angeles (https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-s...) used the PR4 prototype unit months BEFORE Carmack requested a version to try out. It had position tracking and optical pre-distortion at this time. So those concepts were around before Carmack was involved. As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. The Hillcreast IMU Carmack wrote hard-coded support for (which you can look at in Doom BFG and see for yourself) was not even used for the final DK1, let alone later models. The used IMU was created by nrp as the 'adjacent reality' tracker, later hired by Oculus (and you can see the code for THAT tracker too, as both the DK1 and DK2 have had their source released on github).

Despite the first two development versions of the Rift having source available, Zenimax have yet to point to a single line of code as "ah-HAH! you copied this!".

Carmack's key work went into GearVR, not the Rift, where he worked with Samsung on the low-level changes to android (bypassing the Android compositor and USB stack, implementing racing-the-beam asynchronous timewarp).

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

#137

Post by nikcub »

Jerry2 wrote: post #101

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…

After reading the details of the case i'm wondering why Facebook even took this to trial.

Would love to have been in the room when Facebook lawyers found out about Carmack deleting discovery material after receiving the claim and after Googling how to remove it safely.

That's a hall of fame level dumb criminal move.

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

#138

Post by josephpmay »

abandonliberty wrote: post #123
rasz_pl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its under NDA

I honestly don't know if you are joking. I would appreciate seeing a source for that.

I think he probably meant that as a joke, and I would imagine that the contents of the NDA were part of the trial's discovery, however most NDA's I've been signing recently have included a clause that the NDA itself is confidential.

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

#139

Post by aedron »

zaroth wrote: post #114
Jerry2 wrote: post #101

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…

Wow... Very damn compelling and puts the $500m in perspective. I always wonder when they are able to show someone made a particular Google search months after the fact, where are they pulling that data from? Surely the browser history is long gone...

Companies monitor and log network traffic. Usually looking for inappropriate content, sometimes other things (like which employees are looking at job sites).

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

taneq wrote: post #125
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…

Oculus was working pretty closely with Valve for a fair while there. Is there any chance that this will come back to bite Valve now that this precedent has been established? It would be easy to claim that Valve gained some of their VR know-how from their partnership with Oculus.

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