It would appear that the Oculus Rift/Facebook buyout is not the only thing putting the VR company in headlines as of late. New allegations of theft have tarnished the celebration.
After ZeniMax stated their intentions to take legal action last week (due to an IP claim regarding the technology used in the new Rift headset), the folks at Oculus VR have publically responded (dismissing the allegations as “false…but not surprising”).
In a point by point statement recently released, they have provided a detailed list which disputes many of the rival company’s claims (which are as follows):
- 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.”
Much of the initial dispute stems from the period of time that John Carmack spent at ZeniMax, resulting in the accusation that he took key developmental elements with him when he left (which would later become the Oculus). Carmack responded via Twitter stating that, “…Oculus uses zero lines of code that I wrote while under contract to ZeniMax.”
We’ll bring you more on this legal dispute as it breaks.