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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

The problem for John Camack was I think he was on both sides of the table writing code - so he wrote the code at Zenimax & re-wrote the code at Oculus. From a layman's perspective, he very well could have been "copying".

Normally when you design clean room implementations, you use different people and make sure that the people who write the code never see the prior written code and the person giving the spec doesn't see the newly written code.

They were just in-sufficiently cautious legally, possibly un-surprising given Carmack's prior history in founding Id software, and got hit with a lawsuit.

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That seems like it is saying that Zenimax owns not only the code Carmack wrote while he was there, but also the knowledge and experience he gained while working there.

I think it's more that Zenimax thinks it owns the unique ideas that Carmack, a top talent in his field, created while he was working there. They're not angry that he wrote the same 4x4 matrix inverse function for both them and Oculus.

Or more specifically, if Zenimax's claims are correct, while he was working on company time and equipment.

What is the alternative? Do we force everybody to undergo mind wipes whenever they leave the company so they don't take any skills they picked up on the job with them?

How many people can forget everything they know every time they get a new job?

The alternative is probably non-compete contracts (which are enforceable if paid) so that people don't immediately go from one company to its direct competitor.

I think it's a balancing act with plenty of gray area. Personally, I almost always side with employees in cases like this, because it's ridiculous to me that a company could claim ownership of things that its employees create which are unrelated to their jobs, or which they produced with their own time and resources.

But I also think that there are some people who are exceptional cases. The real high earners in a company, especially if they're technical staff, are probably real luminaries in their field, and the company is paying them a significant premium in both money and autonomy because they believe that such an employee will produce a lot of valuable new ideas for the company.

So if your rock star programming wizard quits to start a new company, taking a project that they've been iterating on during work hours on their company computer for the past 6 months while they were drawing a paycheck...well, if you look at it from the company's point of view, you can understand why they would feel like they got robbed blind.

Specifics matter in legal proceedings.

In general, this argument would be laughed out of court of course. However, Carmack worked not only in the same domain, he worked on developing the exact same product at both companies - so this opens up to potential liability.

Yes, I think it all comes down to what copyright actually is. Is it the words on the paper, or the ideas behind them?

In other words, can you commit thoughtcrime?

This was my thoughts exactly. If what the OP was proposing was not legitimate myself and countless others would be in legal jeopardy. I have written code that does the same thing at numerous employers because I am hired to solve the same problem. This doesn't mean I've copied anything, it just means I know what the hell I am doing.

If this was not legal, we would all be bound to the same employer for life. This could be extrapolated to virtually any employee. Have you assembled burgers for McDonald's before? If so, you can't work at Burger King, because they also make burgers and you have proprietary knowledge of McDonald's burgers.

I have spoken with numerous individuals who added support for specification X to one vendor's product, then did the same at the next job, so on and so forth. One individual had implemented the same specification for 3 different companies, all competitors, in just a few years. When you consider the breadth and depth of some specifications, the code doubtlessly is similar in form and obviously identical in function.

Not to mention that the Zeni prototype was merely adequate, while the Oculus product is polished.

I think that ZeniMax are seriously salty about shoving off VR now that it's blossoming. That being said, working on company equipment during company time? Carmack screwed up.

> That being said, working on company equipment during company time? Carmack screwed up.

I'm fairly sure Carmack saw his role as one of a researcher, such that working on VR and sharing knowledge with the outside was part of what he was being paid for. I'm not familiar with his contract but I remember his communications regarding VR at the time and that's the way it appeared.

This argument I don't understand. Carmack was tasked with making a Doom demo for VR, so he did. Why it is such a shocker that he worked on a company project with company time is a mystery to me. He even pushed Zenimax to make a releasable version, but the upper management thought VR was a waste of time which is why he left.

No, it's more than Zenimax owns not only the code Carmack wrote while he was there, but also the design on which that code was based. If there were literal design documents written up, I think we would all agree that is clearly true. When the designs are all in one person's head, it becomes gray enough to take to court.

Only the verbatim design documents are copyrighted. The ideas in them are protected as free speech.

Things don't need to be "protected" to be free. Free is the natural legal state. There has to be laws passed to grant monopolies. Hence why copyright, patent, etc are laws.

And "ideas" aren't a protected form of free speech.

By "They were just in-sufficiently cautious legally, possibly un-surprising given Carmack's prior history in founding Id software" you mean the story of how Carmack left SoftDisk and did work for Apogee (on Softdisk computers after hours using a key technique he developed at SoftDisk) and started Id (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software#History)?

Thanks for mentioning that; I had forgotten that little nugget of history -- it does show this wasn't Carmack's first rodeo at this kind of employer/tech transition.

I had not read until browsing wikipedia just now that the the adaptive tile refresh technique at issue back in that transition was first implemented in a game called "Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement". (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh ) That's an ironic game title for ya given all that has followed!

Somewhere in the post, he mentions:

"This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo."

So it seems like it's not only code he wrote, but code other people at Occulus wrote too?

Carmack didn't write any of the code that Zenimax claimed was derived from what he'd written at id. He hasn't done any work on the PC side at all.

That's one of many messed up things about this case. When Zenimax sued Oculus they assumed Carmack had been working as part of the existing Oculus team, but he'd actually started up an entirely separate project, working with Samsung on mobile VR, it just hadn't been announced yet.

That caused problems for Zenimax, and the list of misappropriated trade secrets shrank to seven software features that the expert witness was certain had been copied, whereas it was originally "all software and all hardware except the display and lenses."

Another witness with actual expertise in VR quickly established that none of the seven features were even trade secrets.

Wow

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