Oculus Loses $500M in ZeniMax Lawsuit -- Likely Due to Palmer Luckey Mentor Not Testifying?

Pretty brutal ruling:

In awarding ZeniMax $500 million, the jury also said that Oculus did not misappropriate trade secrets as contended by ZeniMax. Of the $500 million, Oculus is paying out $200 million for breaking the NDA and $50 million for copyright infringement. Oculus and Luckey each have to pay $50 million for false designation. And Iribe has to pay $150 million for the same, final count.

Ironically, Luckey's secret Reddit name when he was secretly financing a pro-Trump group was "NimbleRichMan" -- and this ruling seems likely to make him much less rich. And Oculus lost at least partly because the defense wasn't very nimble: Reportedly, VR pioneer Nonny de la Peña was not brought to testify on Oculus' behalf, even though her testimony would have refuted a key ZeniMax claim, that John Carmack (who once worked for ZeniMax), not Luckey, was the key developer of the first Rift prototype. Nonny knows otherwise:

Palmer Luckey was de la Peña’s intern at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, learning and honing much of his VR abilities under her guidance. Working with de la Peña in 2012, Palmer Luckey originally built what would become a prototype for the Oculus Rift (nearly a year before his famous Kickstarter) for her acclaimed “Hunger LA” VR experience at the Sundance Film Festival.

And now, without her testimony, Oculus is probably out hundreds of millions of dollars.

Comments

[trush]

I found most racists to be liars. What's the surprise?

[Mac]

But are most liars racist?

[Dana]

Funny how this lawsuit had nothing to do with who had the earlier or better pipedream about a VR headset. It was about the significant portion of ZeniMax code, co-authored and then stolen by John Carmack, that appears now, today in every driver package for Oculus headsets sold. Code that Carmack himself admitted to stealing, which is the same code Luckeys own VR programmer testified in court that he and others were instructed to cannibalize and paste the magic parts directly into the Oculus driver package to make it work like they wanted it to. Over 10,000 VR related files, along with the complete source code for RAGE and the complete ID Tech 5 engine source were stolen by Carmack... caught red-handed. You can quibble all you want about "Nonny" because it has absolutely NOTHING to do with this case. Thieves deserve what they get when outcomes like this happen, but there's still room for it to get even better. If ZeniMax pursues an injunction to force Oculus to end all use of ZeniMax code, it's highly likely they would get it due to the proven willfulness in the actions of both Carmack AND Oculus. Oculus would be forced to rewrite their software to function differently from how it does now with ZeniMax code in it, which is what they make guilty parties in these type of cases do to prove the end result is of their own design and not still using stolen methods and code. Probably not a game-breaker if they're as good as some think they are, if they weren't stuck and needed to lift code Carmack knew existed and could get to solve their dilemma. It's better than fiction!