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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

#141

Post by ojr »

psyc wrote: post #56
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...

It's also an outrageous insinuation that John Carmack, the father of the FPS, needed "knowledge gained from Zenimax" in order to make Oculus happen.

I think you are undervaluing the codebase, if he used a codebase that was touched by 10 engineers with an average pay of 100k, the codebase cost 1 million to make in just one year, it would be hard for any engineer no matter how good to match the man hours of 10 engineers, Zenimax owned that knowledge and paid a high price for the value

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

#142

Post by gcp »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #99
cpncrunch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, clearly it wasn't frivolous, so if they did think that then it would be evidence of them not doing proper due diligence. I guess it's possible they just didn't care. What's another half billion dollars to facebook?

"It's a speeding ticket. Just pay it." -- paraphrasing Zuckerberg's lawyer in The Social Network The interesting question is whether FB will indemnify Carmack. $150M is a hell of a speeding ticket.

It's not clear whether Carmack was actually the one to get that fine, sounds like it was Iribe.

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

#143

Post by gcp »

donatj wrote: post #129
taneq wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Alice hires Bob, and Bob sells Alice's information to Charlie, and Charlie makes $2bn out of it, then it seems fair to hold Charlie responsible as well. Otherwise all you're doing is creating a market for sacrificial goats to take the fall while the company making the money gets away clean.

If Charlie doesn't know Bob's information is tainted, all you're doing is punishing the innocent for a crime they didn't commit.

It's called due diligence. The fact that Facebook didn't do it was a factor in the trial.

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

#144

Post by gcp »

modeless wrote: post #41
_m8fo wrote: post #9

Facebook bought Oculus for $3B [1] 16% of the purchase price for infringing on an NDA is pretty damaging. I believe that'll be a good deterrent in the future. [1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-actually-paid-3-billi... (thanks for the correction, Cozumuel)

A deterrent for what? What's the lesson here? If you're a student don't sign an NDA on the off chance you'll later found a company and get acquired by Facebook for $2B? The real takeaway here is, if you have world-class tech guys working for you then don't support them, just tie them up in contracts, and when they leave and become successful you can sue them to get 25% of whatever they made, at zero risk to you.

if you have world-class tech guys working for you then don't support them, just tie them up in contracts, and when they leave and become successful you can sue them to get 25% of whatever they made, at zero risk to you.

He was free to not let id get bought out or to take a lower paying offering elsewhere.

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

#145

Post by stupidcar »

Idontagree wrote: post #71
spatulon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That seems like a lot, I didn't think he was worth that much, maybe I'm undervaluing his net worth. Is there a value for that anywhere?

He presumably got a sizeable chunk of Oculus shares when he joined as CTO, and those would have been converted to a valuable amount of Facebook equity during the $3bn buyout.

Kind of irrelevant though, as the article is wrong, and it's actually Luckey and Iribe who are personally liable, and not Carmack.

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

#146

Post by efraim »

psuedonymous wrote: post #133
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…

>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.

Not that it matters for your point, but it was the other way around. They are using a mesh based pre-distortion now.

>Although the exact distortion parameters depend on the lens characteristics and eye position relative to the lens, the Oculus SDK takes care of all necessary calculations when generating the distortion mesh.

https://developer3.oculus.com/documentation/pcsdk/latest/con...

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

#147

Post by sangnoir »

jackmott wrote: post #126
deelowe wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

he enabled Zenimax's game to run on an oculus. zenimax didn't have a VR headset to sell, or plans to make one Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a playstation 4, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS4. that...is what he is supposed to do!

> Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a playstation 4, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS4.

Your allegory is ending a bit too soon and missing some nuance: Imagine if this story was about carmack getting access to a Playstation 5 prototype, and helping improve it and doing a demo of Doom on PS 5. He then leaves Zenimax to work for Sony - on the PS 5

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

#148

Post by sangnoir »

psyc wrote: post #56
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...

It's also an outrageous insinuation that John Carmack, the father of the FPS, needed "knowledge gained from Zenimax" in order to make Oculus happen.

> It's also an outrageous insinuation that John Carmack, the father of the FPS, needed "knowledge gained from Zenimax" in order to make Oculus happen

He sold that knowledge to Zenimax for $100m and was on the clock. Perhaps he shouldn't have sold id Software if he wanted to freely use the IP. I'm reminded of those MySQL folk who cashed out to Sun/Oracle but still wanted to exploit on on the IP afterwards.

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

#149

Post by DannyBee »

xadhominemx wrote: post #37
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...

Fortunately, juries do not create precedent.

Unfortunately, every piece of caselaw in the united states is the same, and has found the same.

IE This has been the law in every state forever.

Even the most liberal of states here, like california, find the same way, because they let employers claim things that "relate, at the time of conception or development, to the employers business, or the employers actual or demonstrable anticipated research or development".

Most engineers like to cut it off before the or, and like to believe their employer's business is very narrow.

Courts read both very broadly.

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

#150

Post by psyc »

ojr wrote: post #141
psyc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also an outrageous insinuation that John Carmack, the father of the FPS, needed "knowledge gained from Zenimax" in order to make Oculus happen.

I think you are undervaluing the codebase, if he used a codebase that was touched by 10 engineers with an average pay of 100k, the codebase cost 1 million to make in just one year, it would be hard for any engineer no matter how good to match the man hours of 10 engineers, Zenimax owned that knowledge and paid a high price for the value

Zenimax does not own anybody's knowledge. They own source code.
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