ZeniMax Try To Sue Oculus VR, Oculus VR Responds In Style

Peter Donnell / 11 years ago

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ZeniMax media have been on a warpath recently, it’s targets set firmly upon Oculus VR. Their cause for was is that they feel John Carmacks work at ZeniMax carried over with him when he moved to Oculus Rift, they’re trying to sue Oculus VR for a pile of cash, saying some of the technology was their idea, or at least that some of those ideas belong to them. Carmack responded to this claim in style “ZeniMax owns the code that I wrote, but they don’t own VR.”

This kind of thing isn’t uncommon in the technology world, but it does raise question that ZeniMax didn’t pursue this sooner, only bringing the issue to light once Facebook was writing the cheques. Of course thing have moved on now as Oculus VR have made their statement, and so far it is their only statement and by the sounds of it, it’s also their last word on the matter. Check out what they had to say below, then let us know what you think of all this in the comments section below.

We are disappointed but not surprised by Zenimax’s actions and we will prove that all of its claims are false. In the meantime, we would like to clarify a few key points:

There is not a line of Zenimax code or any of its technology in any Oculus products.
John Carmack did not take any intellectual property from Zenimax.
Zenimax has misstated the purposes and language of the Zenimax non-disclosure agreement that Palmer Luckey signed.
A key reason that John permanently left Zenimax in August of 2013 was that Zenimax prevented John from working on VR, and stopped investing in VR games across the company.
Zenimax canceled VR support for Doom 3 BFG when Oculus refused Zenimax’s demands for a non-dilutable equity stake in Oculus.
Zenimax did not pursue claims against Oculus for IP or technology, Zenimax has never contributed any IP or technology to Oculus, and only after the Facebook deal was announced has Zenimax now made these claims through its lawyers.
Despite the fact that the full source code for the Oculus SDK is available online (developer.oculusvr.com), Zenimax has never identified any ‘stolen’ code or technology.