Last week, Facebook-owned Oculus VR was accused of outright pilfering virtual reality technology (mainly seen in its Rift headset) from Zenimax, the parent company of id Software and Bethesda Game Studios. It’s not an entirely farfetched notion — Oculus VR CTO John Carmack did resign from id less than a year ago — but as of right now, Zenimax doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of proof.
Oculus VR has released an official statement addressing the matter, noting that they are “disappointed but not surprised” by the accusations being leveled at them. Additionally, the company intends to “prove that all of its claims are false,” and even released a handy list of facts people ought to be keeping in mind.
- 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.”
Facts can certainly be misconstrued, but it is tough to argue with that last bullet point. Why is Zenimax waiting to identify the code in question? Though it seems a bit fishy right now, it’s unlikely a company the size of Zenimax would launch very public and very serious allegations without some semblance of a plan. Carmack commented on the situation last week when it first arose.
No work I have ever done has been patented. ZeniMax owns the code that I wrote, but they don’t own VR. Oculus uses zero lines of code that I wrote while under contract to ZeniMax.
We’ll have to wait and see how this unfolds, but Zenimax picking a fight with Facebook is no small occurrence. In fact, it’s almost popcorn-worthy. Let’s just hope it all stands to better the future of VR technology, not hinder it.
[Via: GameSpot]
