The lawsuit doesn’t come as a tremendous surprise as lawyers from ZeniMax repeatedly sent letters to Oculus VR and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) that claiming that the popular Rift headset was infringing on its intellectual property. While I detailed their claims on May 1, 2014, here at ValueWalk, lets take a moment to review the claims.
ZeniMax Media is the parent company of the video game publisher Bethesda Softworks and id Software which was responsible for Doom and other popular first-person shooters in addition to other titles.
Outright theft?
In a statement released Wednesday, ZeniMax accuse Oculus VR and founder Palmer Luckey of “unlawful exploitation of intellectual property, including trade secrets, copyrighted computer code, and technical know-how relating to virtual reality technology that was developed by ZeniMax after years of research and investment.”
In the lawsuit, the company is claiming that there would be no Oculus Rift were it not for the work of ZeniMax.
“Intellectual property forms the foundation of our business,” said ZeniMax Chairman and CEO Robert Altman in a statement. “We cannot ignore the unlawful exploitation of intellectual property that we develop and own, nor will we allow misappropriation and infringement to go unaddressed.”
ZeniMax believes (and claims) that John Carmack, who joined Oculus as chief technology officer in August, improperly shared intellectual property. that became the heart of Rift, while Carmack was still employed at ZeniMax.
Oculus denies claims
After receiving the letters sent by ZeniMax earlier this month, Oculus denied any wrong doing.. “We are disappointed but not surprised by Zenimax’s actions and we will prove that all of its claims are false,” read a statement from Oculus.
“Oculus uses zero lines of code that I wrote while under contract to Zenimax,” Carmack has also gone on record as saying.
