Seems there is no getting away from lawsuits for Oculus VR's founder Palmer Luckey. Not only is Palmer embroiled in a legal tussle with ZeniMax – the parent publisher of Fallout – but it is also entangled in a lawsuit with Total Recall Technologies.
A district judge in San Francisco has now decided that part of a lawsuit against Luckey can proceed. Total Recall Technologies is Luckey's ex-employer and the lawsuit alleges that he breached his contract. The company claims that Luckey took confidential information and represented it as his.
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the claims of a breach of contract against Luckey could proceed. However, the judge dismissed several other civil claims made by Total Recall technologies, including those alleging that Luckey defrauded the company.
For the unfamiliar, in May 2015, the Hawaiian-based company – which creates head mounted displays – sued the Oculus VR founder for the violation of a confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement signed by him when working for Total Recall Technologies in 2011.
The lawsuit claims that Luckey built the Oculus Rift VR headset based on feedback and data collected from the prototype head-mounted display he created for Total Recall Technologies.
Luckey, however, denies the allegations and says that the legal tussle is more to do with companies wanting a slice of the $2 billion, which Facebook shelled out in March 2014 when it acquired Oculus VR.
He said that Total Recall Technologies's claim is "a brazen attempt to secure for itself a stake in Oculus VR's recent multi-billion dollar acquisition by Facebook."
Luckey is also embroiled in a legal battle with ZeniMax Media (as we reported previously). This lawsuit too claims that certain trade secrets made their way to Oculus VR by way of an ex-employee of ZeniMax Media. These trade secrets were instrumental in the development of the Oculus Rift VR headset.
Even as Total Recall Technologies and Luckey are locking horns over whether the latter stole pertinent information that aided in the creation of the Oculus Rift, it is safe to assume that whatever the Oculus VR founder may or may not have learnt at the time of creation of the prototype head-mounted display for the company will not be relevant for the current Rift model that Oculus will be retailing.
Facebook-owned Oculus is set to ship the first-ever consumer model of its Rift VR headset in March this year, which will cost $599.
