Last week, ZeniMax made some rather bold unsubstantiated claims that John Carmack took ZeniMax property, otherwise known as code, and applied it to the evolution of the Oculus Rift. Prior to Carmack joining Oculus, he was working on a VR solution for ZeniMax, until they stopped work on the project. Since his joining of Oculus, they have seen their VR headset turn into a consumer ready product. ZeniMax is claiming that Carmack and their code are the reasons why Oculus’ headset is now almost ready for consumer consumption. ZeniMax is seeking compensation from Oculus, which of course, was recently sold to Facebook for gobs of cash.
Oculus issued a short statement yesterday, which will be their “only response” about these claims “at the time.”
Below is what Oculus had to say regarding ZeniMax’s claims:
“We are disappointed but not surprised by Zenimax’s actions and we will prove that all of its claims are false. In the meantime, we would like to clarify a few key points:
-
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.”
via Giant Bomb
