News

Oculus CTO Denies Stealing VR Tech

Earlier this week, Oculus was found by a Dallas court to have stolen virtual reality tech from ZeniMax and was forced to pay $500 million to the plaintiff. Now, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Oculus, John Carmack – the former lead programmer at id Software, where he was responsible for such games as DOOM, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D – has taken to Facebook to deny the charge, accusing the plaintiff’s expert witness of lying about the charge of “non-literal copying” on behalf of Oculus. “Being sued sucks,” Carmack said.

“[T]he plaintiff’s expert […] said Oculus’s implementations of the techniques at issue were “non-literally copied” from the source code I wrote while at Id Software,” he explained. “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.”

“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.”,” Carmack declared. “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.”

“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,” the Oculus CTO added.

Carmack – dangerously for a man who has already been part of a massive lawsuit – then starts to question the integrity of the expert witness, suggesting that he may have lied for money.

“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,” Carmack accuses. “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. In many cases, the consequences are significant. There should be a danger to your reputation if you are imprudent.”

While the above quotes express the gist of Carmack’s point, his screed goes on a bit, so check out the original Facebook post if you want to read all of his his potentially libellous remarks.

ZeniMax has dismissed Carmack’s claims, telling Polygon:

“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 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.”

While the lawsuit may be over, more legal action could be forthcoming; Oculus may appeal the decision, while ZeniMax could attempt to block further sales of the Oculus Rift VR headset.

Ashley Allen

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Corsair Introduces K70 Pro TKL Keyboard With Rapid Trigger

Corsair has just launched a new keyboard aimed at serious gamers, the K70 PRO TKL.…

15 hours ago

Panasonic TB-40S45AEY, S45 Series 40 inch Full HD LED Smart TV

FULL HD PICTURE PERFORMANCE: Elevate your viewing with this LED TV's High Definition resolution and…

15 hours ago

Panasonic TV-40S55AEY, S55 Series 40 inch Full HD LED Smart TV

HD COLOUR ENGINE: Experience vibrant visuals with this LED TV's HD Colour Engine processing chip,…

15 hours ago

suptek 2 Floating Shelf Wall bracket 

Compatibility - The wall mount shelf is compatible with wood and concrete walls. The adjustable…

15 hours ago

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

GenreScience FictionFormatDVD-VideoContributorMckenna Grace, Paul Rudd, Kumail Nanjiani, Carrie Coon, Finn WolfhardLanguageEnglishRuntime1 hour and 55 minutes…

15 hours ago

Hisense 55 Inch 144Hz Mini-LED Smart TV

Picture Quality: 240 Mini-LED PRO Local Dimming Zones | Quantum Dot Technology | 144 Hz…

15 hours ago