Zenimax were recently award $500 million as they won their case against Oculus Rift, a jury ruled that the individuals hadn’t stolen any trade secrets but did find that Palmer Luckey and Oculus did not comply with a non disclosure agreement.
Zenimax then threatened further action and has now filed for an injunction that would halt sales of Oculus Rift and anything they claim contains Zenimax code. That could include the SDK’s for the headset, and the Unreal and Unity engines.
The move seems to have been spurned, in part, by Facebook’s response to the damages awarded.
The jury’s damage award here, however substantial, is an insufficient incentive for Defendants to cease infringing. Just minutes after the jury revealed its verdict, Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, publicly stated that the jury’s verdict of a half billion dollars was “not material to [Facebook’s] financials.”
Facebook have responded saying that the “verdict was legally flawed and factually unwarranted.” As mentioned earier, a Texas jury found Oculus did not misappropriate trade secrets from ZeniMax so the basis for this new injunction seems unclear, other than Zenimax didn’t like the response from the Facebook COO and want more cash.
Source: UploadVR
camdaz
Oh dear for all Rift owners, then again Facebook has plenty of money to fight it out in the courts.
The Lone Steven
Facebook vs Zenimax. Both with stupid amounts of cash to throw around and i hope it doesn’t effect either one. Zenimax owns Bethesda, who, also own or have several contracts with developers that normally wouldn’t be given a chance. Arkane Studios(Dishonoured), ID Software(for the Doom reboot and it surpassing all expectations by being the best Doom it could be) etc..
Also, Oculus Rift is still a thing? I forgot about it. It seems VR is on the downsize already or could just be a dry spell atm.
But Zenimax vs Facebook will be interesting to see. That said, I can see both parties wanting to avoid it and both are fairly fair. Ok, they did pull the Scrolls Trademark BS a few years back but they usually don’t pull BS like that.
Andrewww
What an incredibly stupid statement by Facebooks Sandberg. Obviously they don’t appreciate all the money they make from their users, if they don’t really care wasting it like that.