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[MrJoe]

duh, corporations are people now. just as fundamental rights are afforded to you or I as people, corporations are afforded those same rights under the law. the US supreme court has already ruled on that issue.

so john carmack (the person) worked on HMD technology while he worked for zenimax. now john carmack wants to carry that work over to occulus, but everything carmack did while working for zenimax is property of zenimax. seems like they have a case.

now obviously corporations are not the same as people, but under the law their is no such distinction.

 

[ElectricKaibutsu]

At first I thought it was just the lure of that $2 billion but this case actually sounds legit. I'm betting FB settles pretty quick.

 

[call_kotaku]

You know, even if there were no 'patents', there still was a sharing of information and expertise, is that not entitled to some form of compensation? Throwing that out there for legaGAF.

John Carmack tweeted that Zenimax owns all the code he wrote while working there (none of which is used in Oculus), but they "don't own VR". All the basic tech fundamentals aren't trade secrets or proprietary technology (Morpheus and probably every other competitor in the next few years will use all the same ideas), so Zenimax has no claim over them.

Whether or not a court agrees is another thing.

 

[plagiarize]

duh, corporations are people now. just as fundamental rights are afforded to you or I as people, corporations are afforded those same rights under the law. the US supreme court has already ruled on that issue.

so john carmack (the person) worked on HMD technology while he worked for zenimax. now john carmack wants to carry that work over to occulus, but everything carmack did while working for zenimax is property of zenimax. seems like they have a case.

now obviously corporations are not the same as people, but under the law their is no such distinction.

Everything Carmack did working for Zenimax were *specific* implementations of techniques which aren't 'protected Zenimax IP'. If he gave the source code for those implementations to Oculus they would have a case. Nothing in this court docket demonstrates that.

 

[MrJoe]

Everything Carmack did working for Zenimax were *specific* implementations of techniques which aren't 'protected Zenimax IP'. If he gave the source code for those implementations to Oculus they would have a case. Nothing in this court docket demonstrates that.

it demonstrates that they have a case. how the presiding judge will rule on that case is another matter. I'm not a fortune teller, I couldn't say how the case will be ruled on. the bar deciding what is required to bring a case before a judge is much lower than the bar that decides how a case will be ruled on.

 

[maabus1999]

Carmack shouldn't be tweeting anything right now when a lawsuit is pending; probably making the lawyers presenting his case tear their hair out...

Most likely this will be settled and Zenimax will get something.

 

[GoaThief]

Best outcome for all would probably be settlement out of court.

VR technology won't be held back, Zenimax will be happy (it seems their complaint has merit) and Facebook will barely notice the financials involved, and even if they did it's to secure their place in the VR sphere which by all indications is important to them.

 

[Bluemercury]

Zenimax is horrible just like Bethesda....

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

I'm betting they will settle

 

[DieH@rd]

Response by Oculus VR when reached out:

Update in the Kotaku article

Zenimax is not suing them because of the current technology. It sues them because their employee spend a lot of his time creating tech foundation and large scale promoting Oculus Rift into a popular thing.

 

[Dice]

Zenimax is not suing them because of the current technology. It sues them because their employee spend a lot of his time creating tech foundation and large scale promoting Oculus Rift into a popular thing.

And they are saying that didn't happen. There are two things that could have occurred. He could have contributed unique (copyrightable) things to them, or he could have done things common to VR which they observed and then made their own version of apart from him. The latter is something that every other company developing VR has done, so it is not a basis of product ownership.

 

[bj00rn_]

Zenimax is not suing them because of the current technology. It sues them because their employee spend a lot of his time creating tech foundation and large scale promoting Oculus Rift into a popular thing.

Knowledge exchanges between employees is not normally grounds alone for one company to sue another company. Most tech-companies in the world would be in trouble if so, and would also be easily exploited.