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Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I hope everybody who comments on this story reads the complaint. There's some really damning stuff in there and some of the more damning claims come with evidence, including Oculus demanding exclusive licensing of IP "shared by Carmack" during negotiations (paragraph 77). That stands in contrast to public statements from Oculus that ZeniMax contributed nothing.

ZeniMax knows that Oculus holds the stronger public opinion, for two reasons: (1) people love Oculus, and (2) Minecraft fans are still stinging from ZeniMax's trademark claims against Mojang re: Scrolls. Very good play on ZeniMax's part, dropping a release and an extremely well-written complaint at once. They want to control the narrative.

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The whole complaint is interesting. The tricky thing about citing claims about ZeniMax's IP is that those claims hinge on the IP actually belonging to ZeniMax. Oculus and Carmack may be able to make a case that the VR work Carmack did isn't bound up in Carmack's work-for-hire agreement with ZeniMax.

But directly using ZeniMax properties to promote the thing while working under a cloud of IP ownership uncertainty was probably not a great move.

After reading, I was reminded of ConnectU LLC v. Mark Zuckerberg and The Facebook, Inc. Which, given recent events around the ownership of Oculus, is hilarious.

While Oculus surely shouldn't have used ZeniMax's stuff in their demo, and should definitely pay some kind of damages for it, it seems like a small part of what's at play.

Or is it supposed to show how fast-and-loose Oculus was with other people's stuff?

Edit At least reading through the rest, and taking ZeniMax at their word, it looks like ZeniMax has a credible claim that it's their software that got the Rift working. But if true, it feels like there should be some discrete evidence of that by looking at what's running on the Rift.

I hope everybody who comments on this story reads the complaint. There's some really damning stuff in there...

Naturally a complaint will be written to portray the defendant in as unfavorable a light as possible. As with federal indictments, I wouldn't want to see people form their opinions of a company based on the content of a one-sided complaint against them (not a lawyer, not legal advice).

I was fairly vocally opposed to the Facebook acquisition of Oculus, but still, let's wait for the Oculus response and subsequent settlement or trial.

prediction: facebook settles with zenimax for an undisclosed amount of money/stock/ip licensing with no admittance of wrong doing.

You conveniently snipped the part of that observation that included evidence.

Evidence selectively included in a complaint or indictment is still biased. One can present a carefully chosen subset of all knowable facts in support of nearly any position.

However, it was not my intention to misconstrue your comment, and if you feel that I have done so, I apologize.

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