If the original complaint is to be believed(1) - which Juror's found credible -the course of events, tldr was something like this:
- Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009.
- Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013.
- Carmack was enthralled with VR.
- Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try.
- Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax.
- Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press.
- Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe.
- Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through.
- Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him.
- FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued.
Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable.
It's Carmack's video that lent credibility to the campaign.
And it's Carmack's original IP (Doom) that made the demos compelling.
It may be a weird system that Zenimax is entitled to $500m but since Carmack was an employee, under contract with Zenimax - who had paid >$100m to buy him / his IP - it sounds like this was a fair verdict.
What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.
Seems fair to me as well. There's already postings dismissing any IP settlement as "unfair" here but that's fairly unrealistic in the real world. If IP can't be defended then that chills investor confidence. Why should I invest in company x if employees can leave with all the IP and go start company y?
Note this wasn't some submarine patent troll out of nowhere. This was a Zenimax employee working on another company's product on their time. This was also about NDA violations and a boatload of shady dealings by Facebook who famously bought Oculus over the weekend and left no time for a proper discovery of liabilities. There's little controversial about this. Carmack and Luckey were simply wrong and Oculus should have worked things out better with Zenimax. FB needs to do better due diligence. A lot of bad players were punished today. The VR industry is too young and fragile to have these shenanigans become the norm. Signaling to investors that VR IP is protected is a good for everyone.
"Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable."
The HMD was functional before Carmack got involved. For example, Hunger in Los Angeles (https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-s...) used the PR4 prototype unit months BEFORE Carmack requested a version to try out. It had position tracking and optical pre-distortion at this time. So those concepts were around before Carmack was involved.
As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. The Hillcreast IMU Carmack wrote hard-coded support for (which you can look at in Doom BFG and see for yourself) was not even used for the final DK1, let alone later models. The used IMU was created by nrp as the 'adjacent reality' tracker, later hired by Oculus (and you can see the code for THAT tracker too, as both the DK1 and DK2 have had their source released on github).
Despite the first two development versions of the Rift having source available, Zenimax have yet to point to a single line of code as "ah-HAH! you copied this!".
Carmack's key work went into GearVR, not the Rift, where he worked with Samsung on the low-level changes to android (bypassing the Android compositor and USB stack, implementing racing-the-beam asynchronous timewarp).
>The liability of Defendants was established by uncontradicted evidence presented by ZeniMax, including (i) the breakthrough in VR technology occurred in March 2012 at id Software through the research efforts of our former employee John Carmack (work that ZeniMax owns) before we ever had contact with the other defendants; (ii) we shared this VR technology with the defendants under a non-disclosure agreement that expressly stated all the technology was owned by ZeniMax; (iii) the four founders of Oculus had no expertise or even backgrounds in VR—other than Palmer Luckey who could not code the software that was the key to solving the issues of VR; (iv) there was a documented stream of computer code and other technical assistance flowing from ZeniMax to Oculus over the next 6 months; (v) Oculus in writing acknowledged getting critical source code from ZeniMax; (vi) Carmack intentionally destroyed data on his computer after he got notice of this litigation and right after he researched on Google how to wipe a hard drive—and data on other Oculus computers and USB storage devices were similarly deleted (as determined by a court-appointed, independent expert in computer forensics); (vii) when he quit id Software, Carmack admitted he secretly downloaded and stole over 10,000 documents from ZeniMax on a USB storage device, as well as the entire source code to RAGE and the id tech® 5 engine —which Carmack uploaded to his Oculus computer; (viii) Carmack filed an affidavit which the court's expert said was false in denying the destruction of evidence; and (ix) Facebook's lawyers made representations to the court about those same Oculus computers which the court's expert said were inaccurate. Oculus’ response in this case that it didn’t use any code or other assistance it received from ZeniMax was not credible, and is contradicted by the testimony of Oculus programmers (who admitted cutting and pasting ZeniMax code into the Oculus SDK), as well as by expert testimony.
> Carmack intentionally destroyed data on his computer after he got notice of this litigation and right after he researched on Google how to wipe a hard drive—and data on other Oculus computers and USB storage devices were similarly deleted (as determined by a court-appointed, independent expert in computer forensics);
After reading the details of the case i'm wondering why Facebook even took this to trial.
Would love to have been in the room when Facebook lawyers found out about Carmack deleting discovery material after receiving the claim and after Googling how to remove it safely.
The idea of Zenimax preventing Carmack from accessing the id tech 5 source code is heartbreaking to me. That's like cutting out a part of someone's brain.
The free software third wave can't come soon enough.
Wow... Very damn compelling and puts the $500m in perspective.
I always wonder when they are able to show someone made a particular Google search months after the fact, where are they pulling that data from? Surely the browser history is long gone...
Large fines like these, even if the facts are clear, do not support competition and seem anti-consumer and anti-innovation. Either the fines should be smaller or the laws changed to better balance what concretely happened: a poaching of a key employee that led to the development of a big product.
That being said, Facebook doesn't really seem to have its R&D figured out. It's poisoned by bad leadership. Palmer Luckey managed to disgrace himself in public opinion in a way that seems hostile to recruiting the kind of progressive, free-thinking talent that makes up most R&D teams. John Carmack, besides his political leanings, speaks derisively of "Hollywood people" (Oculus users) and came out of this lawsuit looking like a real jerk chasing a huge check at any cost. At the end of the day, he betrayed a video game company.
Mark Zuckerberg has a lot of leadership faults disguised behind an amateurish ownership structure that puts him outside of public accountability. Despite its huge head start, Oculus is seriously threatened by HTC, Sony, Google and Samsung. Paper and Facebook payments didn't really go anywhere. Though Instagram and WhatsApp seem to be good acquisitions, even at their extraordinary prices, a broken clock can still be right twice a day. And it doesn't really take leadership to spend huge amounts of money on acquisitions—that's the easy way out. Outside of Facebook, his New Jersey schools efforts were not well regarded. Will his $3 billion commitment to a SF Biohub be marred by similar issues? I'm just nervous is all.
I think market sentiment will catch up with this ruling. Eventually someone's going to ask if he's the right guy to be in charge of Facebook. The public investor may never actually have the power to do something about it.
Being hired to work on projects, using your companies time and money, and then taking that project to another company yourself, is stealing. Stealing is very anti-competative, and massively increases risk in investment. If anything, this case shows that you can steal a companies resources to make your own products, and if its a good idea then lawsuits are just a cost of doing business.
> what concretely happened: a poaching of a key employee
Not quite the reason for the fine according to TFA:
> Instead, it ruled that Luckey, who was working as a contractor for Zenimax before starting the Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift headset, violated his non-disclosure agreement,
> Large fines like these, even if the facts are clear, do not support competition and seem anti-consumer and anti-innovation.
Supporting competition or being pro-consumer / pro-innovation should not come at the cost of individual property rights, which is one of the cornerstones of wealth creation. I can agree with curtailing property rights in some extreme cases (eg. antitrust litigations or eminent domain), but I don't see any reason to do so in the case of Zenimax.
Very interesting result and shows the value of contracts. A lot of times people want to say, "Oh, that's just paperwork" and after years and years of Alphabet Soup Regulatory Agencies hovering over my RFP and business proposal work for clients, I have the utmost respect for signed documents and what they are there to enforce.
This isn't just finger-pointing accusations any more, this is a multi-hundred-million dollar verdict about a significant future market. Anybody who might consider pulling a similar stunt - and didn't learn from the public shitshow that was Cruise Automation's dirty laundry hung out in public - should be wise to study this case.
Disruption is fine and dandy overall, it's just that the Ends will also be measured by the Means in time.
This whole situation leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth regarding Zenimax.
So their biggest claim, surrounding Oculus being built on trade secrets, is found false but they get a half-billion dollar payout anyway?
Considering the purported fines could be traced back all the way to practically the original Kickstarter...I wonder if Zenimax would have gotten such a sum had Oculus not been bought by FB for $3B[1]...
Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg told CNBC's Julia Boorstin that she was "disappointed in certain elements of the decision." Sandberg added she was "considering our options to appeal," and the verdict was "not material to our financials."
Sure, FB has a lot of money. But still -- $500M is "not material" to their finances?
It's not material because they have the cash and it will not harm future cash flow. They also don't have to pay it all, Facebook is on the hook for $300m and the rest is from Luckey and Iribe.
Facebook just announced earnings this afternoon and banked $3.568b in profit for the quarter. That's 12x they'll pay even without any insurance. They have $29.45b in the bank so this is a 1% hit at worst, so as Sandberg said: not material to their finances. On top of that, as others have said they probably have already reserved the resources.
There was a likely an indemnification clause in the acquisition agreement that indemnifies Facebook for this, meaning that the cost of this settlement comes out of Oculus and/or its former shareholders. (Alternatively they could have a clause that reduces earn-out payments or other contingent consideration.)
Consequently, the verdict would not be material to Facebook.
The company may have already reserved 500M for a potential resolution and took the hit in a previous quarter. This is typical of many companies, which is why you sometimes see stock prices rise after a legal settlement that comes in much lower than anticipated.
For example, suppose they set aside 1B legal reserve for this case. That hit was already taken. Now they would reclaim 500M of that, which would be accretive.
Related: I believe you can take offset such a settlement from profits to reduce taxes. Never really understood the rationale for this. Seems pretty arbitrary and another example of how corporations are often favored over humans.
> However, the jury also found Wednesday that Oculus didn’t violate any trade secrets. Instead, it ruled that Luckey, who was working as a contractor for Zenimax before starting the Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift headset, violated his non-disclosure agreement, according to a Polygon report.
I don't understand how this works. Why does Facebook have to pay $500M over an NDA violation between an individual and his previous company? It seems like ZeniMax should only have a case against Palmer Luckey.
TechCrunch says "Oculus pays $200M for NDA [breach of contract], $50M for false des[ignation], $50M for copyright [infringement], Luckey pays $50M false des, Iribe pays $150M false des" [1]
So it's more like FB/Oculus pay 300m, Luckey 50m, Iribe (former CEO) 150m. It looks like the judgement is against Oculus and their execs, which misrepresented what was sold to FB. It seems like they were found innocent of theft, which would have been more the more damaging charge going forward IMHO.
As it is, it's a big cash penalty and that's it; which could mean FB might choose to cut their losses and just pay, rather than risk going through an appeal.
If Alice hires Bob, and Bob sells Alice's information to Charlie, and Charlie makes $2bn out of it, then it seems fair to hold Charlie responsible as well. Otherwise all you're doing is creating a market for sacrificial goats to take the fall while the company making the money gets away clean.
Because Oculus (now part of Facebook) was built on the NDA breach. (It is the court's opinion that) Luckey misappropriated trade secrets, formed that misappropriation into Oculus, and then sold that to FB. IANAL, but I suspect it's a 'receipt of stolen goods' argument - FB should have known through it's due diligence that what they were buying was stolen property.
A deterrent for what? What's the lesson here? If you're a student don't sign an NDA on the off chance you'll later found a company and get acquired by Facebook for $2B?
The real takeaway here is, if you have world-class tech guys working for you then don't support them, just tie them up in contracts, and when they leave and become successful you can sue them to get 25% of whatever they made, at zero risk to you.
>John Carmack, Oculus chief technology officer and founder of a company owned by ZeniMax, improved on the device using his knowledge from his previous work as a ZeniMax employee.
> Though the Court uses definite language, the information is based on allegations only
I highly recommend it. It provides much more perspective and appears to be a strong case. The decisions - both in their favor and against - appear reasonable based on publicly available information.
The accusation that Palmer was incapable of creating the Rift without Carmack's help and that he had a barely functional prototype, if true, is pretty insulting to Carmack. Carmack is a smart guy and I every much doubt he'd have joined on at CTO if the prototype was as awful as ZeniMax says it was.
> A Dallas, Texas jury today awarded half a billion dollars to ZeniMax after finding that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, and by extension Oculus, failed to comply with a non-disclosure agreement he signed.
> 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.
I wonder if this decision will be final, or if either party will appeal. Facebook has stated they will appeal, but Zenimax has threatened an injunction. While an injunction seems unlikely to achieve fruition, just the chance that it might (which would completely halt VR for Facebook) seems enough of a risk to just move on.
Then again, what do I know about giant corporations suing each other. I've always found it comical how much money Samsung and Apple spent suing each other, but they seem to make money just fine.
Good to hear that the jury made the right decision on the ridiculous charges against Carmack. Sad to hear that they think a bunch of litigious assholes deserve $500 million for getting a signature on an NDA.
[+] [-] aresant|9 years ago|reply
- Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009.
- Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013.
- Carmack was enthralled with VR.
- Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try.
- Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax.
- Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press.
- Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe.
- Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through.
- Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him.
- FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued.
Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable.
It's Carmack's video that lent credibility to the campaign.
And it's Carmack's original IP (Doom) that made the demos compelling.
It may be a weird system that Zenimax is entitled to $500m but since Carmack was an employee, under contract with Zenimax - who had paid >$100m to buy him / his IP - it sounds like this was a fair verdict.
(1) https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Faceb...
(2) http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-...
[+] [-] daenz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|9 years ago|reply
Note this wasn't some submarine patent troll out of nowhere. This was a Zenimax employee working on another company's product on their time. This was also about NDA violations and a boatload of shady dealings by Facebook who famously bought Oculus over the weekend and left no time for a proper discovery of liabilities. There's little controversial about this. Carmack and Luckey were simply wrong and Oculus should have worked things out better with Zenimax. FB needs to do better due diligence. A lot of bad players were punished today. The VR industry is too young and fragile to have these shenanigans become the norm. Signaling to investors that VR IP is protected is a good for everyone.
[+] [-] psuedonymous|9 years ago|reply
The HMD was functional before Carmack got involved. For example, Hunger in Los Angeles (https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-s...) used the PR4 prototype unit months BEFORE Carmack requested a version to try out. It had position tracking and optical pre-distortion at this time. So those concepts were around before Carmack was involved. As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. The Hillcreast IMU Carmack wrote hard-coded support for (which you can look at in Doom BFG and see for yourself) was not even used for the final DK1, let alone later models. The used IMU was created by nrp as the 'adjacent reality' tracker, later hired by Oculus (and you can see the code for THAT tracker too, as both the DK1 and DK2 have had their source released on github).
Despite the first two development versions of the Rift having source available, Zenimax have yet to point to a single line of code as "ah-HAH! you copied this!".
Carmack's key work went into GearVR, not the Rift, where he worked with Samsung on the low-level changes to android (bypassing the Android compositor and USB stack, implementing racing-the-beam asynchronous timewarp).
[+] [-] gshulegaard|9 years ago|reply
Also what about all the flippant allegations Zenimax was making about Luckey's technical expertise?
What about the allegations that the IP was from Zenimax proper?
[+] [-] blazespin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jerry2|9 years ago|reply
>The liability of Defendants was established by uncontradicted evidence presented by ZeniMax, including (i) the breakthrough in VR technology occurred in March 2012 at id Software through the research efforts of our former employee John Carmack (work that ZeniMax owns) before we ever had contact with the other defendants; (ii) we shared this VR technology with the defendants under a non-disclosure agreement that expressly stated all the technology was owned by ZeniMax; (iii) the four founders of Oculus had no expertise or even backgrounds in VR—other than Palmer Luckey who could not code the software that was the key to solving the issues of VR; (iv) there was a documented stream of computer code and other technical assistance flowing from ZeniMax to Oculus over the next 6 months; (v) Oculus in writing acknowledged getting critical source code from ZeniMax; (vi) Carmack intentionally destroyed data on his computer after he got notice of this litigation and right after he researched on Google how to wipe a hard drive—and data on other Oculus computers and USB storage devices were similarly deleted (as determined by a court-appointed, independent expert in computer forensics); (vii) when he quit id Software, Carmack admitted he secretly downloaded and stole over 10,000 documents from ZeniMax on a USB storage device, as well as the entire source code to RAGE and the id tech® 5 engine —which Carmack uploaded to his Oculus computer; (viii) Carmack filed an affidavit which the court's expert said was false in denying the destruction of evidence; and (ix) Facebook's lawyers made representations to the court about those same Oculus computers which the court's expert said were inaccurate. Oculus’ response in this case that it didn’t use any code or other assistance it received from ZeniMax was not credible, and is contradicted by the testimony of Oculus programmers (who admitted cutting and pasting ZeniMax code into the Oculus SDK), as well as by expert testimony.
[0] http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14478258/zenimax-oculus-inju...
[+] [-] rbobby|9 years ago|reply
Disappointing behavior right there.
[+] [-] nikcub|9 years ago|reply
Would love to have been in the room when Facebook lawyers found out about Carmack deleting discovery material after receiving the claim and after Googling how to remove it safely.
That's a hall of fame level dumb criminal move.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|9 years ago|reply
The idea of Zenimax preventing Carmack from accessing the id tech 5 source code is heartbreaking to me. That's like cutting out a part of someone's brain.
The free software third wave can't come soon enough.
[+] [-] zaroth|9 years ago|reply
I always wonder when they are able to show someone made a particular Google search months after the fact, where are they pulling that data from? Surely the browser history is long gone...
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|9 years ago|reply
That being said, Facebook doesn't really seem to have its R&D figured out. It's poisoned by bad leadership. Palmer Luckey managed to disgrace himself in public opinion in a way that seems hostile to recruiting the kind of progressive, free-thinking talent that makes up most R&D teams. John Carmack, besides his political leanings, speaks derisively of "Hollywood people" (Oculus users) and came out of this lawsuit looking like a real jerk chasing a huge check at any cost. At the end of the day, he betrayed a video game company.
Mark Zuckerberg has a lot of leadership faults disguised behind an amateurish ownership structure that puts him outside of public accountability. Despite its huge head start, Oculus is seriously threatened by HTC, Sony, Google and Samsung. Paper and Facebook payments didn't really go anywhere. Though Instagram and WhatsApp seem to be good acquisitions, even at their extraordinary prices, a broken clock can still be right twice a day. And it doesn't really take leadership to spend huge amounts of money on acquisitions—that's the easy way out. Outside of Facebook, his New Jersey schools efforts were not well regarded. Will his $3 billion commitment to a SF Biohub be marred by similar issues? I'm just nervous is all.
I think market sentiment will catch up with this ruling. Eventually someone's going to ask if he's the right guy to be in charge of Facebook. The public investor may never actually have the power to do something about it.
[+] [-] devwastaken|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmirS2|9 years ago|reply
Not quite the reason for the fine according to TFA:
> Instead, it ruled that Luckey, who was working as a contractor for Zenimax before starting the Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift headset, violated his non-disclosure agreement,
[+] [-] RestlessMind|9 years ago|reply
Supporting competition or being pro-consumer / pro-innovation should not come at the cost of individual property rights, which is one of the cornerstones of wealth creation. I can agree with curtailing property rights in some extreme cases (eg. antitrust litigations or eminent domain), but I don't see any reason to do so in the case of Zenimax.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|9 years ago|reply
This isn't just finger-pointing accusations any more, this is a multi-hundred-million dollar verdict about a significant future market. Anybody who might consider pulling a similar stunt - and didn't learn from the public shitshow that was Cruise Automation's dirty laundry hung out in public - should be wise to study this case.
Disruption is fine and dandy overall, it's just that the Ends will also be measured by the Means in time.
[+] [-] gshulegaard|9 years ago|reply
So their biggest claim, surrounding Oculus being built on trade secrets, is found false but they get a half-billion dollar payout anyway?
Considering the purported fines could be traced back all the way to practically the original Kickstarter...I wonder if Zenimax would have gotten such a sum had Oculus not been bought by FB for $3B[1]...
...or am I misunderstanding something?
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-actually-paid-3-bill...
[+] [-] LandoCalrissian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
Sure, FB has a lot of money. But still -- $500M is "not material" to their finances?
[+] [-] jonknee|9 years ago|reply
Facebook just announced earnings this afternoon and banked $3.568b in profit for the quarter. That's 12x they'll pay even without any insurance. They have $29.45b in the bank so this is a 1% hit at worst, so as Sandberg said: not material to their finances. On top of that, as others have said they probably have already reserved the resources.
[+] [-] gamblor956|9 years ago|reply
Consequently, the verdict would not be material to Facebook.
[+] [-] elastic_church|9 years ago|reply
You just issue a few billion dollars worth of bonds in Europe, and all the investors are excited about getting exposure to a Silicon Valley company.
Don't have to pay them back for 10-30 years. So, basically not material.
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|9 years ago|reply
For example, suppose they set aside 1B legal reserve for this case. That hit was already taken. Now they would reclaim 500M of that, which would be accretive.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MitchellKnight|9 years ago|reply
I don't understand how this works. Why does Facebook have to pay $500M over an NDA violation between an individual and his previous company? It seems like ZeniMax should only have a case against Palmer Luckey.
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
So it's more like FB/Oculus pay 300m, Luckey 50m, Iribe (former CEO) 150m. It looks like the judgement is against Oculus and their execs, which misrepresented what was sold to FB. It seems like they were found innocent of theft, which would have been more the more damaging charge going forward IMHO.
As it is, it's a big cash penalty and that's it; which could mean FB might choose to cut their losses and just pay, rather than risk going through an appeal.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/01/jury-awards-zenimax-500-mi...
[+] [-] taneq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GauntletWizard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _m8fo|9 years ago|reply
I believe that'll be a good deterrent in the future.
[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-actually-paid-3-billi... (thanks for the correction, Cozumuel)
[+] [-] modeless|9 years ago|reply
The real takeaway here is, if you have world-class tech guys working for you then don't support them, just tie them up in contracts, and when they leave and become successful you can sue them to get 25% of whatever they made, at zero risk to you.
[+] [-] MikusR|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvdcxn|9 years ago|reply
That's a scary precedent...
[+] [-] samfisher83|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psyc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xadhominemx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bbernard|9 years ago|reply
It describes in details what happened.
[+] [-] abandonliberty|9 years ago|reply
> Though the Court uses definite language, the information is based on allegations only
I highly recommend it. It provides much more perspective and appears to be a strong case. The decisions - both in their favor and against - appear reasonable based on publicly available information.
[+] [-] e1ven|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmm01|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soheil|9 years ago|reply
His net worth seems to be only $40 million. What happens to him now?
[+] [-] foota|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corysama|9 years ago|reply
> 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.
http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14474198/oculus-lawsuit-verd...
[+] [-] jayjay71|9 years ago|reply
http://uploadvr.com/verdict-zenimax-oculus/
Then again, what do I know about giant corporations suing each other. I've always found it comical how much money Samsung and Apple spent suing each other, but they seem to make money just fine.
[+] [-] modeless|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|9 years ago|reply
I think its good for fb and bad for the others.
If fb had to pay all then that would've been bad for them.
How many units is occulus selling now?
[+] [-] abandonliberty|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timhj|9 years ago|reply