Eric Johnson
Oculus doesn’t appear interested in settling the intellectual property lawsuit brought against it by game publisher ZeniMax.
In a new filing in a northern Texas district court, the virtual reality company and Facebook subsidiary reiterated that its CTO, John Carmack, co-founder of ZeniMax subsidiary Id Software, did not misuse any information proprietary to ZeniMax in his work on early versions of the Oculus Rift headset. It goes on to say the ZeniMax “appeared to have lost whatever interest it had in VR” until after Facebook spent $2 billion on Oculus.
“ZeniMax never claimed ownership rights over the Rift based on any supposed contribution to any technology in the Rift, because ZeniMax knew it had made none,” the filing says.
The filing also provides more detail on the vaguely worded non-disclosure agreement signed by Carmack and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and previously leaked by a person close to the matter. The NDA, it notes, was in response to a “VR Testbed,” an incomplete game made by Carmack to be used for virtual reality testing:
The NDA was unnecessary because the VR Testbed consisted of nothing but a binary executable file from a small portion of one videogame that Carmack had adapted to test HMD [head-mounted display] devices, together with related art assets. Regardless, the parties never finalized the NDA, which omitted key terms defining what use Luckey could make of the VR Testbed he received. And, of course, Oculus did not even exist at the time Luckey signed the NDA document.
Oculus declined to comment further.
