4 ms·

Founder of Facebook's Oculus hit with lawsuit

31 points by phodo 11y ago

moron4hire 11y ago
Does anyone have a link to the complaint? I'd like to see more details.
- wglb 11y ago
  http://ia601507.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.cand.287721/gov.uscourts.cand.287721.1.0.pdf http://ia601507.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.cand.287...
  - bhouston 11y ago
    Reading that is pretty damning if and only if the prototype that Luckey developed for TRT was very similar to the Oculus Rift prototype. That isn't made clear in the filing. But the general circumstances are pretty suspicious.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
thewhizkid 11y ago
Not speculating, but always found the public story about the beginnings of OR to be somewhat, uh, magical, given his non-technical background.
- cma 11y ago
  "Nontechnical background": >To fund these projects, he earned at least US$36,000 by fixing and reselling damaged iPhones,[2] and was also a sailing coach and did boat repair.[6] >In 2009, he founded ModRetro Forums, a website for discussing modifications to old hardware devices such as game consoles and PCs.[3] >During his study at California State, he worked as an engineer at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR)[12] at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California as part of a design team for cost-effective virtual reality.[2][3]
  - dopamean 11y ago
    I've noticed people recently referring to non-programmers as non-technical. It's a weird thing.
    - tedunangst 11y ago
      Doesn't know Haskell? Non-technical.
staunch 11y ago
Their claims are weak and old. The corporate version of long lost friends asking you for money after they see you on TV.
silverlight 11y ago
Not a whole lot of actual evidence to judge by yet. Will all depend on the supposed contract they claim Lucky signed, and how similar the prototype he built for them is to what was showed during the Kickstarter campaign. Amusing the parallels here between Lucky and Zuckerberg.
wisienkas 11y ago
All these lawsuits in IT are seriously getting ridiculous. Some times they are right, sometimes they are not. But really why all this confidential and agreement. If you work just 1 place they can accuse that you use knowledge from there in your new job. Life is hard, Don't attack personal people, just live harder.
giarc 11y ago
At least he can go to his new owner for personal advice about these type of situations...
- kzhahou 11y ago
  Drop the "Rift". Just "Oculus." It's cleaner.
interdrift 11y ago
That's because they are hungry for money. He built this and he deserves all that he got.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  How on earth do you know that? Are you an Oculus insider?
  - interdrift 11y ago
    No. And I don't know. I'm sceptical about it tho.
  - staunch 11y ago
    We know Palmer Luckey created Oculus and that his work attracted John Carmack, which led to the VR revolution that exists today. They may have some legal standing even if they have no ethical standing.
josephpmay 11y ago
Lucky may be saved by the fact that a lot of the technology in the original Rift prototypes was developed by USC's ICT which was fine letting him use it. I wonder what the exact technology is that TRT is alleging Lucky stole. Things like this make me really hesitant to intern at a company in the industry I want to go into. If I ever start my own company in that industry (which I plan to do), I will definitely be using a certain percentage of the same technology as any other player is. Even if I knew about the technology before working there, I would still technically be violating a NDA. This reminds me of George Harrison's "Subconscious Plagiarism" lawsuit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infring...
- saurik 11y ago
  > Even if I knew about the technology before working there, I would still technically be violating a NDA. You might be in danger of someone arguing you are violating the NDA, and this might be sufficient liability that you don't want to take that risk, but "technically" you would not be violating almost any reasonable NDA (of course, someone could draft one that was insane) if you learned the information in question through a source that is not covered by the NDA (and this is true even if you "learned" the information a second time due to it being disclosed in some other way later).
- bhouston 11y ago
  The issue likely isn't an NDA but rather IP assignment clauses in contracts. These types of IP assignment clauses are legal and mean that inventions and developments an employee or contract develops during the course of their engagement become property of their employer. Most companies that deal with IP need to have such clauses in their agreements otherwise they could fail due diligence. It would be surprising if the TRT-Luckey agreement didn't have IP assignment clauses.
- makomk 11y ago
  As far as I could tell, they're not alleging he stole any technology. The patent they mention in the lawsuit is for a method of mapping real-world video footage into stereoscopic panoramas that can be viewed with existing, off the shelf VR headsets. They're claiming that he used "feedback" that they provided under NDA to improve his headset, but carefully avoid claiming they created even an iota of the technology used in the Rift.
bhouston 11y ago
This is a problematic situation for Luckey. It really depends on the contract he signed for TRT and what type of feedback he was getting. It appeared that he was technically under TRT contract during the time he developed the Kickstarter campaign - early 2012. It is one thing to quit a position with a company and then create a competing product -- that happens all the time -- but it is a lot different to be contracted by a company to develop a product while at the same time clearly developing a competing product to the company you are contracting with -- getting the IP straight can be very problematic, and it does seem like a clear conflict of interest. I would never recommend doing something like that.
Mikeb85 11y ago
If he took actual materials, they may have a case. Otherwise, sounds baseless. You can't own someone's career experience.
- bhouston 11y ago
  A company can own someones inventions that were developed during the course of a contract or employment is the agreement is done in such a way to assign them. It isn't automatic, but it is a real thing and can lead to legal trouble: http://www.marsdd.com/mars-library/intellectual-property-protection-for-employers/ http://www.marsdd.com/mars-library/intellectual-property-pro... EDIT: Accord to the actual complaint Luckey signed a confidentiality + exclusivity agreement regarding the TRT stuff that has a term of five years: "On August 1, 2011, Luckey executed a written 'Nondisclosure, exclusivity and payments agreement' contract with Seidl on behalf of the Partnership. Two witnesses also executed the agreement on behalf of Luckey at Luckey’s direction: Tom Allan and Jeff Bacon."
moron4hire 11y ago
I had a very similar issue when I was 20 years old. I was an instructor for a martial arts school in my home town. They decided, all of a sudden, that having the most students they ever had meant they were in "hard times" and without notice just stopped paying the instructors. There were a lot of stories about "loyalty" leading up to this. And then, when I quit because I literally could not afford the gas money to show up anymore if I was spending my time there instead of at another job, they sent me a cease-and-desist letter to preemptively warn me against trying to open my own school with their "proprietary information", aka the routine of basic calisthenics, striking and kicking techniques, and other common martial arts training regimes that every other school was doing. Never mind that all I wanted to do was finish my CS degree and had no desire to open a school. Never mind that you can't send a cease-and-desist unless a person has actually done something. They read somewhere they should do this and they did it. To defend against this sort of stuff, you have to be extremely well-versed in your field. You have to know exactly which parts are public knowledge and which parts aren't (and therefore, are proprietary knowledge). You have to know all the dark, secret corners of your field. You have to not only be an expert, you have to be THE expert, the one and only, the master of all knowledge. Because the court won't be. And they don't care. It's your word against your former employer's about what you learned there versus what you knew before versus what is common industry knowledge. I've also worked at a ton of CRUD-y consulting firms that had similar language in their NDAs. I'm sorry, nobody building an OLTP system for keeping track of sales figures on ASP.NET and SQL Server is blazing new trails. Not that there isn't anything new to do in that field, just that cross section of the programmers who are capable of doing it and the managers who are willing to go out on a limb, don't exist in that market segment. Just another reason to stay freelance. Just another reason to refuse to sign NDAs, at least unedited by my own lawyer.

31 points by phodo 11y ago

moron4hire 11y ago

Does anyone have a link to the complaint? I'd like to see more details.

wglb 11y ago
http://ia601507.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.cand.287721/gov.uscourts.cand.287721.1.0.pdf http://ia601507.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.cand.287...
- bhouston 11y ago
  Reading that is pretty damning if and only if the prototype that Luckey developed for TRT was very similar to the Oculus Rift prototype. That isn't made clear in the filing. But the general circumstances are pretty suspicious.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

thewhizkid 11y ago

Not speculating, but always found the public story about the beginnings of OR to be somewhat, uh, magical, given his non-technical background.

cma 11y ago
"Nontechnical background": >To fund these projects, he earned at least US$36,000 by fixing and reselling damaged iPhones,[2] and was also a sailing coach and did boat repair.[6] >In 2009, he founded ModRetro Forums, a website for discussing modifications to old hardware devices such as game consoles and PCs.[3] >During his study at California State, he worked as an engineer at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR)[12] at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California as part of a design team for cost-effective virtual reality.[2][3]
- dopamean 11y ago
  I've noticed people recently referring to non-programmers as non-technical. It's a weird thing.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    Doesn't know Haskell? Non-technical.

staunch 11y ago

Their claims are weak and old. The corporate version of long lost friends asking you for money after they see you on TV.

silverlight 11y ago

Not a whole lot of actual evidence to judge by yet. Will all depend on the supposed contract they claim Lucky signed, and how similar the prototype he built for them is to what was showed during the Kickstarter campaign. Amusing the parallels here between Lucky and Zuckerberg.

wisienkas 11y ago

All these lawsuits in IT are seriously getting ridiculous. Some times they are right, sometimes they are not. But really why all this confidential and agreement. If you work just 1 place they can accuse that you use knowledge from there in your new job. Life is hard, Don't attack personal people, just live harder.

giarc 11y ago

At least he can go to his new owner for personal advice about these type of situations...

kzhahou 11y ago
Drop the "Rift". Just "Oculus." It's cleaner.

interdrift 11y ago

That's because they are hungry for money. He built this and he deserves all that he got.

littletimmy 11y ago
How on earth do you know that? Are you an Oculus insider?
- interdrift 11y ago
  No. And I don't know. I'm sceptical about it tho.
- staunch 11y ago
  We know Palmer Luckey created Oculus and that his work attracted John Carmack, which led to the VR revolution that exists today. They may have some legal standing even if they have no ethical standing.

josephpmay 11y ago

Lucky may be saved by the fact that a lot of the technology in the original Rift prototypes was developed by USC's ICT which was fine letting him use it. I wonder what the exact technology is that TRT is alleging Lucky stole. Things like this make me really hesitant to intern at a company in the industry I want to go into. If I ever start my own company in that industry (which I plan to do), I will definitely be using a certain percentage of the same technology as any other player is. Even if I knew about the technology before working there, I would still technically be violating a NDA. This reminds me of George Harrison's "Subconscious Plagiarism" lawsuit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infring...

saurik 11y ago
> Even if I knew about the technology before working there, I would still technically be violating a NDA. You might be in danger of someone arguing you are violating the NDA, and this might be sufficient liability that you don't want to take that risk, but "technically" you would not be violating almost any reasonable NDA (of course, someone could draft one that was insane) if you learned the information in question through a source that is not covered by the NDA (and this is true even if you "learned" the information a second time due to it being disclosed in some other way later).
bhouston 11y ago
The issue likely isn't an NDA but rather IP assignment clauses in contracts. These types of IP assignment clauses are legal and mean that inventions and developments an employee or contract develops during the course of their engagement become property of their employer. Most companies that deal with IP need to have such clauses in their agreements otherwise they could fail due diligence. It would be surprising if the TRT-Luckey agreement didn't have IP assignment clauses.
makomk 11y ago
As far as I could tell, they're not alleging he stole any technology. The patent they mention in the lawsuit is for a method of mapping real-world video footage into stereoscopic panoramas that can be viewed with existing, off the shelf VR headsets. They're claiming that he used "feedback" that they provided under NDA to improve his headset, but carefully avoid claiming they created even an iota of the technology used in the Rift.

bhouston 11y ago

This is a problematic situation for Luckey. It really depends on the contract he signed for TRT and what type of feedback he was getting. It appeared that he was technically under TRT contract during the time he developed the Kickstarter campaign - early 2012. It is one thing to quit a position with a company and then create a competing product -- that happens all the time -- but it is a lot different to be contracted by a company to develop a product while at the same time clearly developing a competing product to the company you are contracting with -- getting the IP straight can be very problematic, and it does seem like a clear conflict of interest. I would never recommend doing something like that.

Mikeb85 11y ago

If he took actual materials, they may have a case. Otherwise, sounds baseless. You can't own someone's career experience.

bhouston 11y ago
A company can own someones inventions that were developed during the course of a contract or employment is the agreement is done in such a way to assign them. It isn't automatic, but it is a real thing and can lead to legal trouble: http://www.marsdd.com/mars-library/intellectual-property-protection-for-employers/ http://www.marsdd.com/mars-library/intellectual-property-pro... EDIT: Accord to the actual complaint Luckey signed a confidentiality + exclusivity agreement regarding the TRT stuff that has a term of five years: "On August 1, 2011, Luckey executed a written 'Nondisclosure, exclusivity and payments agreement' contract with Seidl on behalf of the Partnership. Two witnesses also executed the agreement on behalf of Luckey at Luckey’s direction: Tom Allan and Jeff Bacon."

moron4hire 11y ago

I had a very similar issue when I was 20 years old. I was an instructor for a martial arts school in my home town. They decided, all of a sudden, that having the most students they ever had meant they were in "hard times" and without notice just stopped paying the instructors. There were a lot of stories about "loyalty" leading up to this. And then, when I quit because I literally could not afford the gas money to show up anymore if I was spending my time there instead of at another job, they sent me a cease-and-desist letter to preemptively warn me against trying to open my own school with their "proprietary information", aka the routine of basic calisthenics, striking and kicking techniques, and other common martial arts training regimes that every other school was doing. Never mind that all I wanted to do was finish my CS degree and had no desire to open a school. Never mind that you can't send a cease-and-desist unless a person has actually done something. They read somewhere they should do this and they did it. To defend against this sort of stuff, you have to be extremely well-versed in your field. You have to know exactly which parts are public knowledge and which parts aren't (and therefore, are proprietary knowledge). You have to know all the dark, secret corners of your field. You have to not only be an expert, you have to be THE expert, the one and only, the master of all knowledge. Because the court won't be. And they don't care. It's your word against your former employer's about what you learned there versus what you knew before versus what is common industry knowledge. I've also worked at a ton of CRUD-y consulting firms that had similar language in their NDAs. I'm sorry, nobody building an OLTP system for keeping track of sales figures on ASP.NET and SQL Server is blazing new trails. Not that there isn't anything new to do in that field, just that cross section of the programmers who are capable of doing it and the managers who are willing to go out on a limb, don't exist in that market segment. Just another reason to stay freelance. Just another reason to refuse to sign NDAs, at least unedited by my own lawyer.