Facebook loses $500m Oculus virtual reality case

winterknight

W
News on the BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38834867
A US court has ordered Facebook and other defendants to pay $500m (£395m) after finding they unlawfully used a firm's virtual reality technology.

The jury found Oculus, which Facebook bought in 2014, used computer code belonging to video game developer Zenimax to launch its own VR headset.
Oculus said it was "disappointed" and would appeal against the ruling
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Andrew Hill

A
Call me shallow but after coming here to see the reactions to this story I've learned of FOVE. I want. Was put off oculus as soon as Facebook got involved.

If frontier don't allow transfer of commander data to psvr (which is pretty awesome I must say having had a play with my sons), I will be ordering fove.

Unlucky Facebook - and sorry for rift owners - I really hope this doesn't hit the oculus roadmap.
 
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Enride

Enride
I would be surprised if 500mil would hurt facebook and the oculus in any noticable way, if their net profit the fourth quarter was 3.6 billion.
 

[HJ]-RedRaven

[HJ]-RedRaven
Its still a major blow to Facebook and VR. It will be interesting to see how much of Zenimax' code was used in the Rift - and if any code still survives today (probably not).

I expect the damages to be lowered though.... $500 million is a lot of Rifts!

And yeah, I hope the Oculus future pipeline is maintained.

Meh I'm pretty ambivalent about FB involvement... I don't use FB very often (or other social media/marketing info mop-up programs), and the info they get back from my Rift is;
HJ-RedRven is playing Elite Dangerous.
HJ-RedRven is playing Elite Dangerous.
HJ-RedRven is playing Elite Dangerous.
HJ-RedRven is playing Elite Dangerous.
HJ-RedRven is playing Elite Dangerous.
... :D (I understand others concern though, to each their own)
 

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
Luckily for Facebook they only lost a small part. Had they lost the bit about stealing zenimax property they were in for a potential 4 billion.

500 million total mostly for breaking ndas surruounding demoing doom3 in vr afaik.

John Carmack wrote a typically open no holds barred summation of his thoughts esp focussing on the expert witness which i reckon may not have gone down too well.

Of the 500 million 150 was from carmack, 50 from lucky and 50 from iribe iirc
 
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SystemShift

S
LoL, Like this bit :-/ "Meanwhile, ZeniMax is mulling over seeking injunctive relief to temporarily halt the sale of Oculus Rift headsets." Ouch thats gona hurt if it happens :)
 
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dogbite

dogbite
By the time this is settled, we will likely be playing on something we haven't seen yet and somebody will likely sue somebody over it. The US has got to be the most litigious country on the planet. Just look at the sheer number of People's Court type shows on afternoon tv. Not casting any judgement here (wouldn't want to get sued hehe), just sayin.
 

vic

V
If someone can sue macdonalds for having their coffee "too hot" and WIN, then you can see that in USA suing is a way of life!...oh well at least there will always be HTC and other emerging headsets coming out.
 

Aute

Aute
vic said:
If someone can sue macdonalds for having their coffee "too hot" and WIN, then you can see that in USA suing is a way of life!...oh well at least there will always be HTC and other emerging headsets coming out.
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A bit offtopic, but the hot-coffee thing is a bit different of what you seem to think. It is the power of media and ignorant people which made it sound so absurd.

Accidents happen to everyone, and they did constantly keep/serve their coffee quite a bit above the temperature you'd get from household coffee machines. It was proven that was the major cause of the accident as, was it a bit colder, nothing extreme would have happened. The woman in question got 3rd degree burns in her lap and legs, had to spend more than week in hospital and undergo some skin transplantaion. Sure, it was also her fault, but serving it so hot that it could cause such a harm was not the wisest idea.

She initially wanted them to only cover hospital expenses, which was something like 15-20k $, in response they offered her 800$..so after all that it is no wonder she sued them for much more.
 

shreddog

shreddog
This is great news, well deserved. The sellout to Facebook was nothing but a punch in the face for VR fans. And it was a treachery to the people and companies who helped Palmer and Oculus in developing their headsets.

Valve revealed some of their secret R&D on VR to Oculus so they could greatly improve their design. Then they sold it out to Facebook.. SHAME

edit: Kind of sounding like a Trump tweet this one :D
 
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Gortron

Gortron
There is absolutely sod all that was worth $500,000,000 no matter how much anyone hates Facebook. Patient trolling is not a good thing and most of this stuff is vague concepts that some prat has agreed to patent. Apple and it's rectangles with rounded corners can be seen on Star Trek before the patent, not to mention several other real world examples.... like a g TV.

Oculus innovated and now lawyers are circling around it. Consider that :rolleyes:
 

Zmidponk

Z
Gortron said:
There is absolutely sod all that was worth $500,000,000 no matter how much anyone hates Facebook. Patient trolling is not a good thing and most of this stuff is vague concepts that some prat has agreed to patent.
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Erm, do you actually know any of the details of this case? At all? John Cormack used to work for Zenimax, and Zenimax were actually interested in helping Oculus develop the Rift, and John Cormack was part of that. He left. When he left, he copied code that was copyrighted by Zenimax and took this code with him. He then joined Oculus. He used this code to help code the Oculus Rift software and develop the Rift headset. This is not 'patent trolling', this is direct theft of copyrighted code, and using that code without being authrised by the copyright holder.
 
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