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Jury Orders Oculus To Pay $500 Million In ZeniMax Lawsuit (polygon.com) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the not-your-lucky-day dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: 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. The decision came back Wednesday afternoon following two and a half days of deliberation in the case being tried in a United States District court in the North District of Texas. Both id Software co-founder John Carmack and Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey were in the courtroom when the verdict was read. During closing arguments, ZeniMax attorney Anthony Sammi called the incident a heist and argued that ZeniMax should be awarded $2 billion in compensation and another $2 billion in punitive damages. Oculus attorney Beth Wilkinson argued that the multibillion-dollar lawsuit was driven by ZeniMax's embarrassment, jealousy and anger, not facts. It remains unclear what sort of impact this will have on the daily retail sale of the Oculus Rift headsets.
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Jury Orders Oculus To Pay $500 Million In ZeniMax Lawsuit More

Jury Orders Oculus To Pay $500 Million In ZeniMax Lawsuit

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  • Facebook's status (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @05:24PM (#53784241)

    [X] Rekt
    [ ] Not rekt

    We'll see what happens on appeal, and what this means to companies that poach employees in the future.

  • Impact? (Score:3)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @05:24PM (#53784243) Homepage

    It remains unclear what sort of impact this will have on the daily retail sale of the Oculus Rift headsets.

    Probably none -- at least, not until after Oculus' appeal is heard.

  • FWIW, this is why you read employment contracts. (Score:5, Informative)

    by kbonin ( 58917 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @05:26PM (#53784265)

    I used to work for Bethesda, a ZeniMax company. Never seen a more legally aggressive employment agreement, I had to reject initial offer until they added an addendum. Without it was essentially a multi-year multi-industry no-compete phrased to get around state laws banning no-compete clauses...

  • Muddy waters (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @05:32PM (#53784321)
    This is a case of a smart person being dumb. If you want technology to be yours, you don't let it touch any machine owned by another company and you do it all on your own time. How a person could muddy the waters like this when the stakes are so high is beyond me.

  • North District of Texas...? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @05:33PM (#53784337)
    Zenimax is in MD, Oculus in CA...yet the trial is in the North District of Texas...? I've been around Slashdot long enough to understand why there are so many trials like this in the "North District of Texas" but it's still baloney that lawyers can shop the district they want to file in. I for one would like my criminal trial to be held in the state which is most lenient to whatever my crime is....

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The Eastern District of Texas is the patent troll haven. This case was in Dallas, not Texarkana or Tyler.

    • You're thinking of East Texas. But I do think it's funny that the mere act of an IP-related trial happening somewhere in Texas, is enough to give the whole thing the stench of illegitimacy. It's funny because it's true.

      Congress should burn that (East Texas) court to the ground and re-instate it somewhere else, just to try to repair the reputation. I'm not saying they can't still have it be corrupt and biased, just that they need to shake it off because it's gotten to the point where everyone knows somethin

      • Would it be possible to write into all your contracts that none of your products could be used in the east district of Texas to avoid this? I suppose even if it was they'd just go up the chain to the next most terrible district.

  • Forgive my legal ignorance (IANAL :), what does 'false designation' mean?

  • Of course Oculus isn't going to just hand over $500M to Zenimax, there will probably be a battle of attrition costing both decades of expensive legal appeals until the first one cracks.

    Of course Zuckerberg has the resources to do the above, but that would be expensive (although not as expensive as $500M). It seems to me a far more cost-effective alternative would be to have Oculus sell its VR tech to Facebook, then just let Oculus collapse and go bust, taking its 500M debts and poor management team with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      You would have to do this BEFORE you got sued for this not to be "actually illegal" and honestly then you'd just go back and amend the claim to sue the assets as well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JustNiz ( 692889 )

        Not true. Theres no legal requirement that one company _has_ to bail out another (even if they own the failing company). Zuk could easily let the comapny go bust. It would also be seen as reasonable that Oculus had to sell their tech in order to meet their new financial obligations.

  • This isn't really a copyright dispute. It's a labor dispute.
    This reminds me of the John Fogerty vs Fantasy Records dispute.
    After Fogerty left Credence he went on a solo career and he was sued by Fantasy for sounding to much like himself.
    If Bethesda can't prove that Cormack didn't copy any code that They own, I don't see how they have a case.
    This sets a terrible precedent for the rites of programmers and frankly I think the only reason they're getting away with it is because Facebook is the parent company.

    • More specifically, the claim was that the music of "The Old Man Down the Road" was essentially a copy of "Run Through the Jungle". Fantasy owned the copyright to Run, and therefore also Old Man, *if* Old Man was a copy of Run.

      The jury found that it was not a copy. Judgement for Fogerty.

      Fogerty then sought attorney's fees; the court ruled that Fantasy's suit was not frivolous and denied fees. Fogerty took the issue of fees it to the Supreme Court, who agreed with the District Court - attorney's fees *may* b

  • Not settled by any stretch of the imagination (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LeftCoastThinker ( 4697521 ) on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @09:59PM (#53785723)

    Going to an appeals court near you in 3, 2, 1.

    Seriously, this is round 1 out of 5, especially with the amount of money we are talking here.

  • When trolls win... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just because he made the mistake of working a bit on VR while he was still employed at Zenimax, even though they haven't done anything VR related, ever... These kind of company policies should be illegal.

  • All of the court documents are available at the link below, including lawyer arguments and questions from the jury: https://www.docketalarm.com/ca... [docketalarm.com]

    Disclosure: I run Docket Alarm.

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