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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

#51

Post by drzaiusapelord »

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…

Seems fair to me as well. There's already postings dismissing any IP settlement as "unfair" here but that's fairly unrealistic in the real world. If IP can't be defended then that chills investor confidence. Why should I invest in company x if employees can leave with all the IP and go start company y?

Note this wasn't some submarine patent troll out of nowhere. This was a Zenimax employee working on another company's product on their time. This was also about NDA violations and a boatload of shady dealings by Facebook who famously bought Oculus over the weekend and left no time for a proper discovery of liabilities. There's little controversial about this. Carmack and Luckey were simply wrong and Oculus should have worked things out better with Zenimax. FB needs to do better due diligence. A lot of bad players were punished today. The VR industry is too young and fragile to have these shenanigans become the norm. Signaling to investors that VR IP is protected is a good for everyone.

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

#52

Post by jonknee »

kafkaesq wrote: post #16

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg told CNBC's Julia Boorstin that she was "disappointed in certain elements of the decision." Sandberg added she was "considering our options to appeal," and the verdict was "not material to our financials." Sure, FB has a lot of money. But still -- $500M is "not material" to their finances?

It's not material because they have the cash and it will not harm future cash flow. They also don't have to pay it all, Facebook is on the hook for $300m and the rest is from Luckey and Iribe.

Facebook just announced earnings this afternoon and banked $3.568b in profit for the quarter. That's 12x they'll pay even without any insurance. They have $29.45b in the bank so this is a 1% hit at worst, so as Sandberg said: not material to their finances. On top of that, as others have said they probably have already reserved the resources.

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

#53

Post by modeless »

elastic_church wrote: post #47
modeless wrote: post #22

Good to hear that the jury made the right decision on the ridiculous charges against Carmack. Sad to hear that they think a bunch of litigious assholes deserve $500 million for getting a signature on an NDA.

> Sad to hear that they think a bunch of litigious assholes deserve $500 million for getting a signature on an NDA. Wait, so if the guy actually abided by the contract he AGREED to, you know as a trustworthy reliable integritable individual, then Zenimax would have the first mover advantage and market lead on this burgeoning market. In this parallel reality that has nothing to do with their ability to execute. They w…

> Zenimax would have the first mover advantage and market lead on this burgeoning market

Bullshit. Zenimax leadership wanted nothing to do with this market! First mover advantage is the opposite of how they work as a company. If it was up to them they would have had Carmack work on something less risky like the 10th installment in one of their IPs, and nothing would have happened.

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

#55

Post by daenz »

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.

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

#56

Post by psyc »

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.

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

#57

Post by pipio21 »

dkonofalski wrote: post #7
cptskippy wrote: post #3

The accusation that Palmer was incapable of creating the Rift without Carmack's help and that he had a barely functional prototype, if true, is pretty insulting to Carmack. Carmack is a smart guy and I every much doubt he'd have joined on at CTO if the prototype was as awful as ZeniMax says it was.

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 all this information.

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

#58

Post by legodt »

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.

I don't think Carmack works that way. All he really cares about professionally (I'm not talking about his personal life or rocketry) is doing good work and pushing his code to the limits of the field. Oculus hardware was a big coding challenge without much marked territory or set rules for Carmack, so that's probably the only thing he was thinking about while working.

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

#59

Post by leggomylibro »

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.

Some alarm bells probably did go off, but they were probably silenced fairly quickly with something along the lines of, "but this is really cool and I want to work on it. Plus, it's not like my employer is actively working on a VR that I'd be competing with."

And at the end of the day, Carmack isn't the one who is out $500M, is he?

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

#60

Post by kgwgk »

hkmurakami wrote: post #23
MikusR wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zenimax wanted 15% of company. 16% one time payment is cheaper.

Nice to have a tax write-off too for FB. (Settlement sums can be offset against profits iirc)

Paying X will reduce profits by that amount and taxes by a much lower amount. I'm not sure FB will consider the whole thing nice. I mean, having to pay twice as much would't be twice as nice.
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