That's a great analogy that I'm surprised I haven't heard before. If I write a book called Gary Potter, about a boy who finds out he's a wizard and goes on (sp

That's a great analogy that I'm surprised I haven't heard before. If I write a book called Gary Potter, about a boy who finds out he's a wizard and goes on (specific) adventures with his friends Jon and Germione... I'd be in trouble. But a book about someone wishing for a better life > finding out they secretly had great powers > struggle to gain control/mastery of the powers > must use the powers to save the world from evil... that's just a story framework and applies to Harry Potter, Star Wars, Hercules(the Disney version at least). There's variations in why they want the better life (abuse, boredom, etc), how they find out, and what the exact evil is. but if you abstract far enough, they're all basically the same story. Using exact code and changing variables like "main_character_name" is clearly infringement, but using a similar abstracted flow shouldn't be. ESPECIALLY in code. If your end goal is to put pixels on a screen. you run algorithms to determine pixels > add those pixels to a buffer > send the buffer to the screen. There's not many other ways to do it. There's only so many ways to implement some things. And if a way is good, independently coming up with the solution isn't copying. In fact, if I came up with a different solution, it would be sub-optimal. For some problems, the abstracted flow of the code is defined for you. "We're doing VR, we want X, Y, Z to happen"... There's not a whole lot of options on how to do that. If Oculus only figured out the flow-charts based on copying zenimax's prototype, then they perhaps are copying. And thats the argument zenimax is shooting for. "this is a non-trivial, non-obvious solution they only got by copying us". But the next question is: at what level of abstraction am i just changing variables at a large scale? If I wrote a book about a young boy living with abusive relatives because his parents died and he finds out he's a wizard and moves away to a magical wizard school, does that count as copyright infringement? There's a point where it is, and a point where it isn't. I can never find the source, but I once saw a 256x256 picture of yoshi, that immediately below it had a 128x128 version of the same picture (stretched to 256x256). Below that was 64x64, etc until the 1x1 was just a green pixel. Along the side it said "at what point does it stop being copyright infringement? If you started at the top (the high res), you could get pretty far down and still go "oh yeah, this is still the same image". but if you started at the bottom, you could get much higher and go "this is some weird abstract art of random pixels"