Oculus responses to Zenimax lawsuit claims

By Kevin Mitchell Posted on April 5, 2014

It was less than a week ago that Zenimax Media has filed a lawsuit claiming the technology that powers the Oculus Rift was stolen by John Carmack. The former id Software co-founder (and father to Doom), John Carmack left to become the new chief technology officer at Oculus.

Oculus has responded by denying the allegations from the Zenimax Media lawsuit, providing a few key points that help prove their side of the case. Feel free to read through them verbatim below:

• 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.