[BLOG] Zenimax File Injunction To Remove Oculus Products From Sale

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PredictedCyborg
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[BLOG] Zenimax File Injunction To Remove Oculus Products From Sale

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Earlier this year, Zenimax and Oculus' legal fight over whether or not the Rift was constructed with the use of copyrighted code that belonged to Zenimax that had come from John Carmack, as well as whether a non-disclosure agreement had been violated came to an end. The court found that while there had been no misappropriation of trade secrets, there was substantial evidence to suggest that copyrights had been infringed and the non-disclosure agreement violated - landing Oculus and their parent company Facebook with a $500 million fine as a result.



That original lawsuit had been asking for $2 billion and at the time it was wondered if Zenimax would choose to go further and try to prevent Oculus Rift and related products that used the code from being sold. Now it seems that they've decided to go ahead with this, filing an injunction to demand products using the code be removed from sale. The wording seems to hint more at the software side of things, but the hardware itself won't be much use without the software to run.



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This doesn't necessarily mean the end of the Oculus Rift though, merely that if successful new code would have to be developed under a 'clean room' environment which means the team would have to have no knowledge of the existing code that came from Carmack. Not the end, but certainly a massive headache especially for a VR company that's fallen behind in recent months behind the Vive and Playstation VR.



Oculus had already said that they were planning to appeal the decision from the lawsuit, and with this new injunction Facebook has called it "legally flawed and factually unwarranted." Indeed a partner at IP law firm McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP, Joshua Rich, spoke to Ars Technica and said that because Zenimax had not gotten the jury to agree on the trades secrets claim that the injunction rested upon "a relatively weak argument" and that the best they could hope to get from the injunction would be the 'clean room' recoding.



Whatever the result is, it's just another obstacle in the way that's going to hinder whatever long-term plans Facebook had for the company when they bought it a few years back for $2 billion (although we now know it was closer to $3 billion). Only time will tell if Oculus can climb back from this.
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