As part of the ongoing lawsuit against Oculus VR on behalf of ZeniMax, Oculus has today responded to ZeniMax’s official court filing with their own comprehensive 32 page document. The response presents what appears to be a strong case for Oculus, largely revolving around John Carmack’s explicit public comments that the Oculus Rift was Palmer Luckey’s invention.
A little refresher to the ZeniMax v. Oculus VR story: Oculus CTO John Carmack, who was formerly an employee of id Software, a ZeniMax subsidiary, took a prototype version of Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift to E3 2012 to demonstrate the VR headset using a version of Doom 3 specially modified for virtual reality. The publicity afforded by Carmack’s demonstration of the Oculus Rift, and Luckey and Carmack’s back-and-forth regarding the VR headset, form the foundation of ZeniMax’s complaint against Oculus VR. ZeniMax summarized their claims in a press release put out when they filed their suit against Oculus:
The suit arises from the defendants’ unlawful exploitation of intellectual property, including trade secrets, copyrighted computer code, and technical know-how relating to virtual reality technology that was developed by ZeniMax after years of research and investment. ZeniMax provided this valuable intellectual property to defendants under a binding Non-Disclosure Agreement that specifies such intellectual property is owned exclusively by ZeniMax and cannot be used, disclosed, or transferred to third parties without ZeniMax’s approval. 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.
In response to ZeniMax’s filing, Oculus VR today submitted their own defendant filing, refuting many of ZeniMax’s claims. Oculus’ document opens citing a public message posted by Carmack back in 2012:
“I warned [Luckey] ahead of time that it was a foregone conclusion that some of the media would report the Rift as my work, despite my ve[r]y explicit description otherwise.”
— id Software Technical Director and ZeniMax employee
John Carmack on Meant To Be Seen (mtbs3d.com),
referring to the Rift developed by Palmer Luckey
(June 7, 2012)
Oculus goes on to say that ZeniMax has never identified the allegedly stolen intellectual property or computer code and says that Oculus “developed or licensed its own software for the SDK. Throughout this painstaking development process, Oculus VR used no hardware or software technology from ZeniMax.” ZeniMax seems to allude to the software pre-distortion technique employed by the Rift as being proprietary to Carmack. However, Oculus’ filing claims that Luckey was using the same technique on even earlier Oculus Rift prototypes prior to ever speaking with Carmack.
Furthermore, Oculus says that Luckey and ZeniMax never finalized their NDA agreement—the NDA being a foundational component of ZeniMax’s claims. Oculus also calls ZeniMax’s lawsuit a “transparent attempt to take advantage of the Oculus VR sale to Facebook.”
One standout paragraph from the document puts into perspective ZeniMax’s claims of Oculus owing its success to publicity generated by Carmack:
…prior to this lawsuit, ZeniMax claimed compensation based on the publicity it had generated for the Rift (along with ZeniMax videogames). This made no sense at the time and it makes no sense now. Suppose ZeniMax had helped create publicity for the Sony PlayStation platform with ZeniMax videogame demos that were made to work on prototype PlayStations. ZeniMax would never say it owned a piece of the Sony PlayStation technology and Sony’s business.
The outcome of this case may yield interesting ongoing politics; if ZeniMax loses the case, I can’t imagine we’ll be seeing and of their games on the Oculus Rift any time soon… though maybe they’d be happy to run with Sony’s Morpheus.
If you’re so inclined, you can review Oculus’ filing here.
