11 ms·

If the original complaint is to be believed(1) - which Juror's found credible -the course of events, tldr was something like this: - Zenimax bought ID software

by aresant 10y ago

If the original complaint is to be believed(1) - which Juror's found credible -the course of events, tldr was something like this: - Zenimax bought ID software for >$100m(1) on June 24, 2009. - Carmack signed up with Zenimax for an earn-out / golden-handcuffs agreement that ended in June of 2013. - Carmack was enthralled with VR. - Carmack found Palmer via an internet forum, reached out to get a rift to try. - Carmack tinkered with the Rift, adding sensors, building calibration, etc. while on the clock / using hardware from zenimax. - Carmack brought a prototype of the Rift working on Doom 3 to E3 with him providing Oculus with their early press. - Zenimax realized the extent to which Carmack was enabling Oculus and worked to negotiate equity with Brendan Iribe. - Oculus sent Zenimax a proposal to discuss a partnership Sept 21, 2012 but never followed up / followed through. - Carmack quit Zenimax the day his contract was up in June 2013, joined Oculus as CTO a few months later and took his 5 best guys with him. - FB bought Oculus March 2014, Zenmix got pissed and sued. Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable. It's Carmack's video that lent credibility to the campaign. And it's Carmack's original IP (Doom) that made the demos compelling. It may be a weird system that Zenimax is entitled to $500m but since Carmack was an employee, under contract with Zenimax - who had paid >$100m to buy him / his IP - it sounds like this was a fair verdict. (1) https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Facebook-motion https://www.scribd.com/document/274211118/Judge-denies-Faceb... (2) http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-to-buy-id/1100-6213068/ http://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-raised-105-million-...

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Seems fair to me as well. There's already postings dismissing any IP settlement as "unfair" here but that's fairly unrealistic in the real world. If IP can't be defended then that chills investor confidence. Why should I invest in company x if employees can leave with all the IP and go start company y? Note this wasn't some submarine patent troll out of nowhere. This was a Zenimax employee working on another company's product on their time. This was also about NDA violations and a boatload of shady dealings by Facebook who famously bought Oculus over the weekend and left no time for a proper discovery of liabilities. There's little controversial about this. Carmack and Luckey were simply wrong and Oculus should have worked things out better with Zenimax. FB needs to do better due diligence. A lot of bad players were punished today. The VR industry is too young and fragile to have these shenanigans become the norm. Signaling to investors that VR IP is protected is a good for everyone.
daenz 10y ago
What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.
- legodt 10y ago
  I don't think Carmack works that way. All he really cares about professionally (I'm not talking about his personal life or rocketry) is doing good work and pushing his code to the limits of the field. Oculus hardware was a big coding challenge without much marked territory or set rules for Carmack, so that's probably the only thing he was thinking about while working.
  - bishnu 10y ago
    If he does, he's come a long way from the John Carmack that consistently open-sourced his 3D engines and followed up with developers who failed to abide by the GPL [0]. (I don't think he works the way you describe at all). [0] https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=20000223184151 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=200002...
- leggomylibro 10y ago
  Some alarm bells probably did go off, but they were probably silenced fairly quickly with something along the lines of, "but this is really cool and I want to work on it. Plus, it's not like my employer is actively working on a VR that I'd be competing with." And at the end of the day, Carmack isn't the one who is out $500M, is he?
  - jMyles 10y ago
    In retrospect, he came out smelling like roses.
  - spatulon 10y ago
    He is personally out $150m, according to the article.
gshulegaard 10y ago
I feel like this timeline is missing somethings...like where does Palmer working as a contractor at Zenimax fit into here? Also what about all the flippant allegations Zenimax was making about Luckey's technical expertise? What about the allegations that the IP was from Zenimax proper?
blazespin 10y ago
Did the juror agree to all of the line items there?
- k-t 10y ago
  No. The jury specifically rejected the claims of misappropriated trade secrets, which was the main thrust of Zenimax's argument. The damages break down to $50M for copyright infringement, $200M for failing to comply with the NDA, and $250M for false designation. While I personally believe they did break the NDA by showing the hardware with the demo Carmack cooked up, the amount of money awarded is beyond absurd.
  - Bamafan 10y ago
    "While I personally believe they did break the NDA by showing the hardware with the demo Carmack cooked up, the amount of money awarded is beyond absurd." That all depends on if the demo was the deciding factor in the multi-billion dollar buyout.
psuedonymous 10y ago
"Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable." The HMD was functional before Carmack got involved. For example, Hunger in Los Angeles (https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-sundance/ https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-s...) used the PR4 prototype unit months BEFORE Carmack requested a version to try out. It had position tracking and optical pre-distortion at this time. So those concepts were around before Carmack was involved. As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. The Hillcreast IMU Carmack wrote hard-coded support for (which you can look at in Doom BFG and see for yourself) was not even used for the final DK1, let alone later models. The used IMU was created by nrp as the 'adjacent reality' tracker, later hired by Oculus (and you can see the code for THAT tracker too, as both the DK1 and DK2 have had their source released on github). Despite the first two development versions of the Rift having source available, Zenimax have yet to point to a single line of code as "ah-HAH! you copied this!". Carmack's key work went into GearVR, not the Rift, where he worked with Samsung on the low-level changes to android (bypassing the Android compositor and USB stack, implementing racing-the-beam asynchronous timewarp).
- efraim 10y ago
  >As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. Not that it matters for your point, but it was the other way around. They are using a mesh based pre-distortion now. >Although the exact distortion parameters depend on the lens characteristics and eye position relative to the lens, the Oculus SDK takes care of all necessary calculations when generating the distortion mesh. https://developer3.oculus.com/documentation/pcsdk/latest/concepts/dg-render/ https://developer3.oculus.com/documentation/pcsdk/latest/con...

by aresant 10y ago

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

Seems fair to me as well. There's already postings dismissing any IP settlement as "unfair" here but that's fairly unrealistic in the real world. If IP can't be defended then that chills investor confidence. Why should I invest in company x if employees can leave with all the IP and go start company y? Note this wasn't some submarine patent troll out of nowhere. This was a Zenimax employee working on another company's product on their time. This was also about NDA violations and a boatload of shady dealings by Facebook who famously bought Oculus over the weekend and left no time for a proper discovery of liabilities. There's little controversial about this. Carmack and Luckey were simply wrong and Oculus should have worked things out better with Zenimax. FB needs to do better due diligence. A lot of bad players were punished today. The VR industry is too young and fragile to have these shenanigans become the norm. Signaling to investors that VR IP is protected is a good for everyone.

daenz 10y ago

What in the world was Carmack doing, working on another company's project, using your current company's time and resources? Don't get me wrong, the guy is a genius, and I love nearly everything he has a hand in, but you would think that with his level of seniority, some alarm bells would have gone off in his head.

legodt 10y ago
I don't think Carmack works that way. All he really cares about professionally (I'm not talking about his personal life or rocketry) is doing good work and pushing his code to the limits of the field. Oculus hardware was a big coding challenge without much marked territory or set rules for Carmack, so that's probably the only thing he was thinking about while working.
- bishnu 10y ago
  If he does, he's come a long way from the John Carmack that consistently open-sourced his 3D engines and followed up with developers who failed to abide by the GPL [0]. (I don't think he works the way you describe at all). [0] https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=20000223184151 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=200002...
leggomylibro 10y ago
Some alarm bells probably did go off, but they were probably silenced fairly quickly with something along the lines of, "but this is really cool and I want to work on it. Plus, it's not like my employer is actively working on a VR that I'd be competing with." And at the end of the day, Carmack isn't the one who is out $500M, is he?
- jMyles 10y ago
  In retrospect, he came out smelling like roses.
- spatulon 10y ago
  He is personally out $150m, according to the article.

gshulegaard 10y ago

I feel like this timeline is missing somethings...like where does Palmer working as a contractor at Zenimax fit into here? Also what about all the flippant allegations Zenimax was making about Luckey's technical expertise? What about the allegations that the IP was from Zenimax proper?

blazespin 10y ago

Did the juror agree to all of the line items there?

k-t 10y ago
No. The jury specifically rejected the claims of misappropriated trade secrets, which was the main thrust of Zenimax's argument. The damages break down to $50M for copyright infringement, $200M for failing to comply with the NDA, and $250M for false designation. While I personally believe they did break the NDA by showing the hardware with the demo Carmack cooked up, the amount of money awarded is beyond absurd.
- Bamafan 10y ago
  "While I personally believe they did break the NDA by showing the hardware with the demo Carmack cooked up, the amount of money awarded is beyond absurd." That all depends on if the demo was the deciding factor in the multi-billion dollar buyout.

psuedonymous 10y ago

"Clearly it's Carmack's genius that made this viable." The HMD was functional before Carmack got involved. For example, Hunger in Los Angeles (https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-sundance/ https://news.usc.edu/32639/hunger-in-l-a-makes-its-mark-at-s...) used the PR4 prototype unit months BEFORE Carmack requested a version to try out. It had position tracking and optical pre-distortion at this time. So those concepts were around before Carmack was involved. As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. The Hillcreast IMU Carmack wrote hard-coded support for (which you can look at in Doom BFG and see for yourself) was not even used for the final DK1, let alone later models. The used IMU was created by nrp as the 'adjacent reality' tracker, later hired by Oculus (and you can see the code for THAT tracker too, as both the DK1 and DK2 have had their source released on github). Despite the first two development versions of the Rift having source available, Zenimax have yet to point to a single line of code as "ah-HAH! you copied this!". Carmack's key work went into GearVR, not the Rift, where he worked with Samsung on the low-level changes to android (bypassing the Android compositor and USB stack, implementing racing-the-beam asynchronous timewarp).

efraim 10y ago
>As for code itself, Carmack implemented the pre-warp as a shader that projected the rectilinear image onto a surface (geometry). This approach was abandoned years ago and is now implemented with a pixel shader. Not that it matters for your point, but it was the other way around. They are using a mesh based pre-distortion now. >Although the exact distortion parameters depend on the lens characteristics and eye position relative to the lens, the Oculus SDK takes care of all necessary calculations when generating the distortion mesh. https://developer3.oculus.com/documentation/pcsdk/latest/concepts/dg-render/ https://developer3.oculus.com/documentation/pcsdk/latest/con...