Oculus VR responds to Zenimax lawsuit

Refutes claims while being "disappointed but not surprised" at Zenimax's actions.
Text: Bengt Lemne
Published 2014-05-05

Following last week's news that Zenimax had filed a suit against Oculus VR over alleged use of Zenimax intellectual property Oculus VR have now come out with a response. It will be the only public response to the on going legal matter that Oculus VR will release:

"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."

What's interesting here and what could become the sticking point of the whole case is the third point: "Zenimax has misstated the purposes and language of the Zenimax non-disclosure agreement that Palmer Luckey signed." It certainly sounds like Palmer Luckey may have signed something indicating that Oculus VR made use of Zenimax properties.

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