A U.S. jury in Texas on Wednesday ordered Facebook Inc, its virtual reality unit Oculus, and other defendants to pay a combined $500 million to ZeniMax Media Inc, a video game publisher that says Oculus stole its technology.
Ouch.
Jury issues $500 million verdict in Facebook virtual reality lawsuit
Interesting to note: this wasn’t the egregious east Texas court.
The only thing surprising about this verdict is that it came out of Texas. It was pretty clear from reading up on the case the the technology was straight up stolen, and worse that Facebook was well informed on this and went ahead with the purchase anyway. Although we all know Zuckerberg has no problem stealing IP.
We can pretty much bet the farm it was a carefully researched (read: estimated) cost of doing business.
First Trump, then Zuckerberg. Yeah, right.
stolen? interesting choice of words. my impression was id founder Carmarck was so enthusiastic about the problem space he wrote code for them, while working at id, but since he had sold id to ZeniMax his time was their time. thus they can argue for a stake in the final product. perhaps legally true, but not what i’d call stolen, either.