In the latest legal battles raging across Silicon Valley and the tech world, ZeniMax Media is taking Oculus VR to court. The lawsuit deals with trade secrets being exchanged and instrumental to the Oculus Rift VR headset becoming a reality while game programmer John Carmack is blamed for acting as the middleman.
The issue is whether ZeniMax had some sort of contribution to Oculus technology without getting credit for it. However, the bigger issue has to do with Carmack being blamed for making Oculus the way it is using knowledge or patents he worked with while he was still a ZeniMax employee.
Carmack was hired by Oculus in August of 2013 and worked with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Previous to this time, he was still employed by ID Software and later ZeniMax, which acquired ID Software in 2009, a company he co-founded that was responsible for games like the Quake and Doom series.
However, Carmack's history with the technology occurred before he actually joined Oculus; he was already working with it at E3, 2012. Carmack even used the game, "Doom 3: BFG Edition" to experiment with the headset, which is a major controversy and mentioned in the complaint because the game or its code was property of ID Software and later ZeniMax.
So, at least at the beginning of Rift's existence, Carmack was a major player and may have been instrumental in making Oculus the way it is. However, there is still the issue whether he acted independently or took ZeniMax's secrets with him.
"Luckey has held himself out to the public as the visionary developer of virtual reality technology, when in fact the key technology Luckey used to establish Oculus was developed by ZeniMax," ZeniMax claims. "ZeniMax's intellectual property has provided the fundamental technology driving the Oculus Rift since its inception. Nevertheless, the defendants refused all requests from ZeniMax for reasonable compensation and continue to use ZeniMax's intellectual property without authorization."
Before this lawsuit, both ZeniMax and Oculus had some legal exchanges that related to a 2012 nondisclosure agreement, which was said to limit the ways in which Oculus could incorporate Carmack's work into its technology. There was talk of publisher equity that fell through.
Maybe the fact Facebook acquired Oculus, tarnishing its humble Kickstarter beginning, a couple of months ago for $2.2 billion has more to do with the lawsuit than anything else. This is what Oculus is certainly claiming.
"It's unfortunate, but when there's this type of transaction, people come out of the woodwork with ridiculous and absurd claims. We intend to vigorously defend Oculus and its investors to the fullest extent," the company says.
Carmack is not backing the lawsuit and protests that he did not use any patents from ZeniMax in his endeavor with Oculus, but his own work. However, he isn't really clear whether that work involved the ID Software code that ZeniMax acquired.
"No work I have ever done has been patented. ZeniMax owns the code that I wrote, but they don't own VR," he tweeted.
ZeniMax is claiming rights to copyright computer code, trade secret information, technical know-how, and rights to sell or transfer to third parties in the lawsuit, among other issues. The 46-page lawsuit can be read here [pdf].
