Facebook Fined 500mil. for Oculus copyright infringement - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14770931
The Oculus Rift is arguably the start of the VR revolution currently working to reach the mainstream, but a jury decided today that the company’s success was in part dependent on the work of ZeniMax, who owns ID Software.

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The lawsuit, launched in 2014 after Oculus’s $2 billion purchase by Facebook, accused Oculus of stealing ZeniMax’s trade secrets to create the early versions of the Oculus Rift, after the company poached John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, owned by Bethesda Softwork, which itself is owned by ZeniMax.

ZeniMax claimed Palmer Lucky could not have created the Oculus Rift without Carmack’s help, saying he created a barely functioning prototype that Carmack greatly refined.

The court found Oculus violated ZeniMax’s non-disclosure agreement, copyright and engaged in false designation by confusing the public into believing that ZeniMax products were actually from Oculus. It did however not agree with the main allegation of violating their trade secrets, with the final award of $500 million a fraction of the $4 billion they demanded.

Oculus claims ZeniMax was simply trying to profit from Oculus’s success, and are likely to appeal the verdict.

In a statement they note:

“The heart of this case was about whether Oculus stole ZeniMax’s trade secrets, and the jury found decisively in our favour,” an Oculus spokesperson told Polygon. “We’re obviously disappointed by a few other aspects of today’s verdict, but we are undeterred. Oculus products are built with Oculus technology. Our commitment to the long-term success of VR remains the same, and the entire team will continue the work they’ve done since day one – developing VR technology that will transform the way people interact and communicate. “

https://mspoweruser.com/oculus-rift-fou ... 0-million/
#14771378
This is an interesting twist in the Facebook acquisition saga. Id's John Carmack apparently violated his non-disclosure agreement with ZeniMax, the owner of Bethesda, and disclosed details about Oculus VR technology that he had been working on for Bethesda. Zuckerberg got tangled up in the scandal when Oculus was revealed to have stolen the technology and falsely portrayed it as their own, and ZeniMax correctly sought the $4 billion in damages, as this technology will be worth a fortune in the future. Zuckerberg's Facebook company has over 20 billion dollars in assets, so, like Bill Gates in the mid 1990s, he can just fork over the $500 million to ZeniMax and go about his day. The privately traded company no doubt will enjoy the cash infusion.

The real loser in all of this is John Carmack who probably invented Oculus for the US Army and is now being sold out by his corporate masters.

http://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-pos ... -facebook/

ZeniMax's lawsuit against Oculus VR did not end well for Oculus, which was yesterday slapped with a $500 million judgment against it. The court ruled that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey had violated his NDA with ZeniMax when the two worked together in the early days of Oculus Rift development, and also that John Carmack, now Oculus CTO, had stolen documents and source code prior to joining the company, and destroyed evidence when he learned about the coming litigation.

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It's typical in cases like these that the parties involved do not comment publicly, especially when further action is pending. But Carmack is not a typical guy, and so he took to Facebook to share his lengthy, and thoroughly unhappy, take on the situation.

"The Zenimax vs Oculus trial is over. I disagreed with their characterization, misdirection, and selective omissions. I never tried to hide or wipe any evidence, and all of my data is accounted for, contrary to some stories being spread," Carmack wrote. "Being sued sucks."

But the real target of Carmack's ire is the expert who testified on behalf of ZeniMax that "Oculus’s implementations of the techniques at issue were 'non-literally copied' from the source code I wrote while at Id Software," he wrote. "This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo. I was genuinely interested in hearing how the paid expert would spin a web of code DNA between completely unrelated codebases."

I was wondering if gangsters had kidnapped his grandchildren and were holding them for ransom

Carmack on ZeniMax's expert witness
"Early on in his testimony, I wanted to stand up say 'Sir! As a man of (computer) science, I challenge you to defend the efficacy of your methodology with data, including false positive and negative rates.' After he had said he was 'Absolutely certain there was non-literal copying' in several cases, I just wanted to shout 'You lie!'. By the end, after seven cases of 'absolutely certain,' I was wondering if gangsters had kidnapped his grandchildren and were holding them for ransom," he continued. "If he had said 'this supports a determination of', or dozens of other possible phrases, then it would have fit in with everything else, but I am offended that a distinguished academic would say that his ad-hoc textual analysis makes him 'absolutely certain' of anything. That isn’t the language of scientific inquiry."

During Oculus' testimony, its expert enlarged slides of the disputed codes so the court could actually read and, presumably, see the differences between them. But despite being plainly different in Carmack's eyes, it didn't make much of an impression. "I had hoped that would have demolished the credibility of the testimony, but I guess I overestimated the impact," he wrote. He also said that he wasn't allowed to read the ZeniMax expert's report, and that the testimony has been sealed. "This is surely intentional -- if the code examples were released publicly, the internet would have viciously mocked the analysis," he wrote.

Carmack concluded with a not-so-subtle suggestion that the ZeniMax expert was more interested in a paycheck than in getting to the truth. "The expert witness circuit is surely tempting for many academics, since a distinguished expert can get paid $600+ an hour to prepare a weighty report that supports a lawyer’s case. I don’t have any issue with that, but testifying in court as an expert should be as much a part of your permanent public record as the journal papers you publish," he wrote. "In many cases, the consequences are significant. There should be a danger to your reputation if you are imprudent."

Oculus VR said shortly after the judgment came down that it would appeal the ruling; ZeniMax said it would seek an injunction "to restrain Oculus and Facebook from their ongoing use of computer code that the jury found infringed ZeniMax’s copyrights"—which could very well spell at least a temporary end to sales of the Oculus Rift.

Update: In response to Carmack's denial, ZeniMax provided the following statement to Gamasutra:

"In addition to expert testimony finding both literal and non-literal copying, Oculus programmers themselves admitted using Zenimax’s copyrighted code (one saying he cut and pasted it into the Oculus SDK), and [Oculus VR co-founder] Brendan Iribe, in writing, requested a license for the 'source code shared by Carmack' they needed for the Oculus Rift. Not surprisingly, the jury found Zenimax code copyrights were infringed. The Oculus Rift was built on a foundation of Zenimax technology."

"As for the denial of wiping, the Court’s independent expert found 92 percent of Carmack’s hard drive was wiped—all data was permanently destroyed, right after Carmack got notice of the lawsuit, and that his affidavit denying the wiping was false. Those are the hard facts."
#14771399
Palmer built the first homebrew VR HMD prototype using a bunch of public forum expertise and other people's code. He used to post on a VR tech forum and stole everyone's shit but props to him he took the initiative instead of just talking about it. Later on Carmack showed interest and contributed improvements. When the company blew up he came on board officially. It is interesting to note that at this time in 2011-2012 Valve started working with oculus and there was a talk of a partnership but Valve didn't like the way oculus wanted to implement tracking-they wanted full VR, oculus was happy with just the HMD experience. This relationship broke down by end of 2014 and HTC came on board, joining Valve's effort to create a full VR experience out of the gate.

Then Facebook wanted to get in early and corner the emerging VR market after the warm reception to Rift DK2, oculus's 2nd prototype. Much of the tech here was actually derived from Oculus's partnership with Valve, before their split in philosophy surrounding VR.

For Facebook, this was a disastrous acquisition (in the hole for $2.5 billion on a soon to be defunct IP), their product was outsold by Vive and the attempt to build a closed software distribution ecosystem on PC exclusive to a peripheral (imagine if your monitor or keyboard only worked with certain games) was beyond dumb. This did great damage to oculus's brand reputation. Also the launch was the worst in tech history. Slated for release a week before Vive, it was only able to ship weeks after, and intermittently due to poor manufacturing and distribution channels.

I say soon to be defunct because people who have finally received their 3rd camera and touch controllers (which are good-yet all of which ends up costing more than Vive in total) are finding that the camera based room scale implementation/tracking technology sucks shit. It simply doesn't work and is plagued with interference-relative to the competition.

Palmer is a master capitalist, he fucked over so many, and ran away with close to $800 million. They either lost huge amounts of money or got jack shit for ideas and code he simply appropriated and labeled as his own. He is personally liable for $50 million in damages following this case, but that's chump change for him now. I like him because he fucked facebook real good.

Finally. What it feels like playing VR sitting down:

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