Zenimax Accuses John Carmack of Stealing VR Tech

John Carmack made waves last year when he left id Software, owned by Zenimax, to join Oculus VR in order to help create its virtual reality headset. Now Zenimax has sent documents to Oculus's legal department claiming Carmack "stole" technology from them when he left. They said, "The proprietary technology and know-how Mr. Carmack developed when he was a ZeniMax employee, and used by Oculus, are owned by ZeniMax. Well before the Facebook transaction was announced, Mr. Luckey acknowledged in writing ZeniMax's legal ownership of this intellectual property. It was further agreed that Mr. Luckey would not disclose this technology to third persons without approval." Carmack says, "No work I have ever done has been patented. Zenimax owns the code that I wrote, but they don't own VR." Oculus was also dismissive: "It's unfortunate, but when there's this type of transaction, people come out of the woodwork with ridiculous and absurd claims."

Comments

Make deals with the devil

[Dutch Gun]

Ah, John, you make deals with the devil... are you then surprised when he comes calling for repayment? It's unfortunate that so many smaller, independent studios are absorbed by larger companies, who then proceed to strip-mine them of their IP and talent, leaving a dessicated corpse of a company in their wake to be discarded at their convenience.

I'm sure their partership with Facebook will be *completely* different.

Re:Make deals with the devil

[Zephyn]

It's not just about people, it's also about the before buyout/after buyout difference in the quality of the products produced by the 'wholly owned subsidiary'.

People who enjoyed games by Westwood, Bioware, or Maxis before they were bought out by EA understand this.

Re:Make deals with the devil

[hibiki_r]

You must have a very different experience with buyouts than I do. I've seen a few over the years. If there are no relocations, some people stay as long as required to get the customary retention bonus, and they they all disappear en masse.

Companies have a culture. Some cultures are pretty good, others are terrible. An acquisition tends to obliterate the purchased company's culture, while bringing in part of the culture of the buyer, except that the team that remains doesn't really buy in that parent culture in the slightest.

So maybe companies aren't something to cry about, but nice relationships and a culture that is destroyed, all for what in the end is seen is a failure of an acquisition, is something that can make people sad, and for good reason.

Re:Make deals with the devil

[Dutch Gun]

If you've ever been a part of a really great team, then you know that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. It's an almost impossible thing to engineer, and extremely difficult to sustain it over a long period. A buyout has a high likelyhood of destroying the magic of that team due to outside interference. A company provides a place to nurture and develop highly effective teams, and has a big part in defining the overall culture at its workplace. I don't think that's an illusion by any means. It's a very real and tangible thing.

After a buyout... yes, many people end up in the parent company, but if they really wanted to be a part of that parent company, they probably would have applied there in the first place. And for those that leave... finding a new job is an incredibly stressful thing, as nearly anyone can attest to. The only benefit is a short term infusion of cash, which gives the company perhaps one cool new project before the honeymoon is over and things start going down the toilet.

EA has swallowed up and destroyed many incredible companies (Bioware is the latest example of a company in rapid decline). For myself, I speak as a fan, as I see the products I previously enjoyed now declining in quality until I give up on them completely. This happens time and time again after acquisition. It's hard not to attribute the cause to the buyout.

then again...

[argStyopa]

...insofar as their product is complete vaporware to date, Romero can clearly claim prior art (pretty much anything he's started where someone else wasnt clearly carrying him).

Just sayin'.

Re:then again...

[Frobnicator]

No, it isn't. From the ZeniMax statement in the article:

The proprietary technology and know-how Mr. Carmack developed when he was a ZeniMax employee, and used by Oculus, are owned by ZeniMax.

So they are claiming that he also stole the "know-how".

If he actually took some ZeniMax programs, that is one thing. And if true, I can see how ZeniMax might have some claims.

But the term "know-how" tends to be common in unenforceable non-compete agreements, and are generally shunned in courts. People learn stuff, making the people more valuable. That is just how life works, and that is not usually a valid claim. When the people move on they can still keep secrets, but they cannot be made to unlearn that which they have learned.

Re:Lack of patents aside...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what people don't understand and the reason why patents suck. Ideas are NOT original. Implementations are.

Re:Lack of patents aside...

[Sarten-X]

That's why patents cover implementations, not ideas.

Implement any given patent in a different way so as not to hit the patent's claims, and you have a whole new (and probably separately patentable) thing.

Trade secrets, not patents

[Dachannien]

What we're dealing with here is a trade secret dispute. Zenimax alleges that Carmack was privy to inside knowledge of Zenimax's work on VR tech while he worked there, and now he's allegedly run off with that knowledge and given it to Oculus VR.

Think of it like the formula for Coca Cola - it's not patented, never has been, but it's protected by trade secrets law. If someone works for Coca Cola and discovers/absconds with the formula, and then sells it to, e.g., Pepsi, then that person violates trade secrets laws by doing so. But if Pepsi independently discovers or reverse engineers Coke to discover the formula on their own, without relying on Coca Cola's inside knowledge, then more power to them.

Re:Trade secrets, not patents

[ShanghaiBill]

If someone works for Coca Cola and discovers/absconds with the formula, and then sells it to, e.g., Pepsi, then that person violates trade secrets laws by doing so.

Back in 2006, this actually happened. Instead of using the formula, Pepsi notified Coca Cola, and Coca Cola then reported it to the FBI. It makes sense that Pepsi would decline the offer, since in blind taste tests most people prefer Pepsi. Coke is successful because of their marketing and brand, not because of the taste of their "secret formula".

Re:Trade secrets, not patents

[tlambert]

It makes sense that Pepsi would decline the offer, since in blind taste tests most people prefer Pepsi.

This is pretty hilarious, seeing that Pepsi had to, at one point, buy Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken before they could force them into contracts that obligated them to buying Pepsi products, since no one wanted to sell Pepsi.

Re:Trade secrets, not patents

[rogoshen1]

with all of those non-dollars they earned from non-customers not-buying their product of course, right? :)

Re:Trade secrets, not patents

[niftymitch]

Well he made a tweet to the effect that none of his ideas had been pursued as patentable
and none had been patented.

He also said they have and own all the code he wrote (note the past tense).

There is a tangle here if Zenimax prevails because it implies that no programmer
can move from one job to another.

To protect himself he would also have to snapshot any and all revision control
systems containing code he worked on (as protection). That however is specifically
prohibited.....

To prosecute an honest violation Zenimax must disclose their magic and discover
code inside the new company.

OR Zenimax needs to continue to pay his salary for a GOSH DARN LONG TIME.
A gosh darn long time could be a lifetime.... in the way Mickey Mouse has a lifetime of protection.
His heirs and their heirs would continue to see a cash flow indexed by inflation, seniority
etc,,,,

Re:Trade secrets, not patents

[viperidaenz]

So what's "real sugar"?
Glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose?

Trade Secret?

[chyminy]

I wonder if this is actually a challenge under Trade Secret law rather than patent law. Depending upon what John signed as a condition of his employment, he could be in some hot water.

Inevitable disclosure

[tepples]

In a lot of cases, the legal theory called inevitable disclosure gets tossed around. It's a way to make a non-disclosure agreement act like a non-compete agreement in jurisdictions that forbid the latter, by convincing a judge that an employee has an unacceptable risk of disclosing trade secrets that he brings with him.

The nasty facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Zenimax lost a fortune when it very foolishly bought iD. iD gave Zenimax exactly ONE game, the disastrous Rage that iD had sank tens of millions of dollars into prior to the sale.

The Rage engine was simply the worst generic engine ever developed- its single greatest failure is completely misunderstanding the work-flow of artists and others that produce the necessary assets for a game. With Rage, Carmack solved an interesting technical problem (that crudely became known as 'Megatexture') that no-one had ever requested be solved for modern game production.

After buying iD, Zenimax sank a new fortune into rapidly expanding the iD teams working on new games (what new games?). Rapidly, they discovered why iD had a reputation as the world's worst GAME designers. Carmack was discovered to be part of the problem, and the company was more than happy for him to "butt out" and go work with Oculus VR while still under his existing contract with Zenimax.

Today, Zenimax has two games about to be released using the Rage engine. Both look visually very primitive compared with other current AAA titles, but at least they should make some profit. HOWEVER, neither game is created by the iD teams in Zenimax.

Zenimax wants their money back. Normally, the world would respond "tough", but the whole Oculus VR/Facebook deal makes Zenimax thinks it may even turn a profit from its purchase of iD.

John Carmack was a 'free' man when Facebook finalised the deal to buy Oculus VR, but he most certainly was promoted by Oculus VR as being a key player in the team that created their success when Carmack was 'owned' by Zenimax. Today Oculus and Carmack will happily state they'll throw out ANY code potentially contaminated by Carmack's Zenimax contract- they had long depended on third-party code from other sources like Valve anyway.

So Zenimax relies on a factually true but nebulous position. And any court will ask why, if Zenimax cared about the assistance provided to Oculus by Carmack (which happened with Zenimax's explicit permission), they didn't reach an arrangement AT THE TIME with Carmack and Oculus. However, it seems that Oculus offered Zenimax some stock (long before the buy-out) which Zenimax couldn't be bothered to make a decision about.

The Law takes a dim view of companies that seek to manipulate a situation so they do the work first, and only THEN attempt to extort THEIR preferred reward. This kind of situation always smells like a well established con.

So Zenimax is going to have to prove some form of dishonesty of the part of Carmack and/or Oculus. But I bet that proves impossible. Neither Carmack nor Oculus had a history of anything but complete openness. Indeed, it was in Carmack's direct interest to be as open as possible, given how stupid Zenimax was in the first place allowing him to work with the Oculus people without a clear contract between Zenimaz and Oculus.

Most of us will expect Facebook to pay Zenimax something to go away, but Zenimax is a big company, and a 'little' pay-out is nothing to them. As I said at the top, Zenimax is actually looking to turn its financially disastrous purchase of iD into a significant profit . A quick Google suggests Zenimax paid north of 100 million dollars, but the income made subsequently from iD 'assets' wouldn't have even paid for the yearly running costs of their new purchase. So I guess Zenimax is looking for at least 100 mill from Facebook, and probably more like 150.

Re:The nasty facts

[Anonymous Coward]

The Rage engine was simply the worst generic engine ever developed- its single greatest failure is completely misunderstanding the work-flow of artists and others that produce the necessary assets for a game. With Rage, Carmack solved an interesting technical problem (that crudely became known as 'Megatexture') that no-one had ever requested be solved for modern game production.

Oh please. You sound like a disappointed, angry fanboy lashing out at the wrong thing.

Every time I've read anything Carmack's written about id Tech 5, he talks about how its design was driven by artist workflow. IIRC, they wrote tools which let artists edit world geometry and paint directly onto it, using the real game engine for rendering, in real time. That frees artists from a lot of extra work carefully splitting their artwork across hundreds or thousands of discrete textures, none of which has anything to do with the creative process. Instead, they can just focus on painting. It also frees them from needing to go through a long multi-step process to see how their art will actually look in-game.

Speaking of which, I work on things which require a significant fraction of a day (FPGAs) or a year (ASICs) between making a change and finding out how it works in the real world. Even when we use simulation, there's still a delay. So I speak from considerable experience when I say that this sucks. People in my profession would kill to have a nearly instantaneous feedback loop. I cannot imagine the artistic process is any different.

I can well believe that the actual tools id produced might not have been suitable for public consumption outside id, but that's a problem they always had. The operation they ran was so small and insular that their engines and tools were usually a little too specialized into the immediate needs of their one-game-at-a-time team, and they never tried to expand their operations to properly support external engine customers. That's why, even before Rage, they tended to lose the engine licensing wars to Unreal Tech and others -- support is at least as important as technology, if not more so.

Also, the only sense in which id Tech 5 answered a question nobody had ever asked (hint: this is not actually true) is that some people (you) are blinkered by the narrow technological valley most game engines exist in. You aren't even able to ask the right questions if you refuse to believe there's a world outside the valley.

After buying iD, Zenimax sank a new fortune into rapidly expanding the iD teams working on new games (what new games?). Rapidly, they discovered why iD had a reputation as the world's worst GAME designers. Carmack was discovered to be part of the problem, and the company was more than happy for him to "butt out" and go work with Oculus VR while still under his existing contract with Zenimax.

Your knowledge of this derives from... what, exactly? Internet rumors? The same hole you pulled your opinions about game engine technology from?

And if Zenimax actually did try to "rapidly expand" id's team, they were fools who hadn't been paying much attention. id had a long history of internal turmoil which would occasionally spill out into the public, and an equally long history of deliberately trying to stay very small. Many "id" games were actually produced by other studios (esp. Raven) because id did not want to be large enough to work on more than one game at a time. Regardless of what you think about that one team's competence as game designers, that culture was doomed to break badly if its new corporate masters did not use extreme caution when instituting major changes.

And it's fucking crazy to assert that Zenimax is truly happy to see someone like Carmack go. Your entire screed about Zenimax needing ROI on their purchase ignores that Carmack himself would have been a huge reason for valuing id Software highly in an acquisition. If you can't keep him around, you have lost a huge chunk of your potential ROI, period. Why the hell do you think they're pursuing this spiteful lawsuit?

This is how we lost "force feedback"

[Torodung]

This is exactly the way "Force Feedback" products got thrown to the wolves. I hope it isn't a similar ending for VR headsets. This stuff has been tried for over a decade.

Re:This is how we lost "force feedback"

[PhilHibbs]

You're saying that with a straight face? Force feedback was a stupid gimmick, good riddance to it.

WRONG

[Anonymous Coward]

Zenimax agreed with Carmack working with Oculus, while still under his original contract with Zenimax. Zenimax accepted that Carmack was coding for Oculus, and actually had a signed agreement with Oculus acknowledging that fact, and claiming ultimate ownership of that code.

Carmack and Oculus are more than happy to ensure that ZERO code owned by Zenimax goes into any future product- by all accounts the code was junk anyway, and every current significant promotion of Oculus Rift is done with other third party software, including code from Valve. Oculus Rift is literally STONE SOUP, which is why every informed person was amazed that the dummies at Facebook thought there was anything worth buying in the first place.

Zenimax chose NOT to have a payment contract with Oculus when they allowed Carmack to work there. This is 100% the fault of Zenimax. Now, after the fact, Zenimax wants to unilaterally set a payment figure, and base this figure NOT on the work Carmack did, but on the fact Facebook paid 2 billion to buy Oculus VR. This logic will crash and burn in court.

The real-deal is that Zenimax wants pay-back for their disastrous decision to buy iD in the first place. Zenimax is well over 100 million dollars down on that deal, and they'd like their money back "thank you very much". But everyone knew the hopeless state of iD before Zenimax wasted their money buying them. Carmack had ran the company into the ground, from a licensed engine perspective, with only one genuine OUTSIDE customer for the Doom 3 Engine, and no outside customers likely for the dreadful Rage engine. iD was desperate to sell, having sank their fortune into the horrible Rage game. Everyone knew iD couldn't design new games, and everyone knew that iD's main success, licensed game engines, was long dead as well. The only sane reason to buy iD was if Zenimax was convinced that it could exploit iD's IP, namely Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein- IP that even iD itself had failed to usefully exploit for years.

Every decision made by Zenimax after the purchase of iD got worse. They paid to buy the rights to 'Prey', the ONLY outside (non-iD financed) title that used the Doom 3 engine, and lost a small fortune there as well, when the Prey 2 project collapsed.

Re:WRONG

[cheesybagel]

Yeah the id Tech engines have lost any market share they had to Unreal Engine or CryEngine.

When you consider that Zenimax itself did not use the id Tech engines e.g. Fallout 3 uses Gamebryo, Dishonored uses Unreal Engine 3, what was the point in buying it? Was it because they thought id Tech 5 would be worth it? With Carmack gone any further engine development is probably not going to happen. So id Tech 5 will probably be the last engine they will have.

It was a lame duck buy.

Re:Lack of patents aside...

[TangoMargarine]

They're all still stupid things to patent.

This has happened before...

[Charliemopps]

This has happened before...
http://scholar.google.com/scho...

This is why there is no CCR, and why Fogerty gave up music entirely out of disgust after this lawsuit. We missed decades of great music from a genius that we'll never get back. Remember this the next time a record company tells you that piracy is theft.

Re:This has happened before...

[UnknownSoldier]

Wow! Interesting back story!

Thank-you for exposing me to new music. Just bought CCR 20 Greatest hits off iTunes. Great to find classic rock when it still had soul before selling out.

Blind Taste Test (Rigged)

[HannethCom]

I have never seen Pepsi claim their blind taste tests are fair. This makes their saying that more people pick Pepsi in their blind taste test perfectly legal. Though I still think it is deceptive.

I took the Pepsi blind taste test. I would even say that the cold, freshly opened Pepsi tasted slightly better than the warm Coke that had been opened over a hour ago. I ended up choosing the Pepsi because I all of a sudden got the craving for the Juicy Fruit that they give you only if you pick the Pepsi.

How do I know the Coke had been open for over 1 hour and the Pepsi was freshly opened? I asked the guy. He said it was policy not to cool the Coke and make sure it was open at least 1 hour. Though they would sometimes cheat and only have them open for 30 minutes when things got really busy. The Pepsi had to be cooled and they were not allowed to use it if it had been open more than 5 minutes.

As for the Juicy Fruit, that was common knowledge here at that time. If you choose Pepsi, you got it, if you choose Coke, you didn't.

Re:Zenimax again?

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds to me like Zenimax doesn't understand that in California, "no compete" carries zero legal weight. I seriously doubt Carmack stole anything, they just don't like that he's using his knowledge and experience at a different company.

Re:Who is Luckey?

[Nemyst]

This is Zenimax suddenly realizing that with Carmack off, their entire id buyout has become worthless. Their engine is awkward and basically only used by id and some related devs. Their games have been subpar at best. The only thing they had was some bright people, and Carmack was the biggest chunk by far.

They're now flailing wildly in the vain hope that they'll be able to get some compensation from somewhere.

For what it's worth

[rsilvergun]

RAGE is an incredible technical feat. What I've heard is it doesn't have the GUI tools. Carmak still does everything from command line...

Re:Zenimax again?

[gl4ss]

well the joke is that he left because zenimax didn't want to give him time to work while at zenimax.

though, I think zenimax doesn't understand that a single source properiaty VR gaming is never going to go far. the provider needs to be an outsider to all game making companies..

seriously though, give me my fucking HD rift already! then I can stop paying for cleaning, hah.

(oh and about using knowledge and experience, zenimax is trying to claim that they own Carmack and his experience because some of that was acquired while working for Zenimax. since it's california it will fail spectacularly and rightly so because if it didn't, then ALL tech workers would be practically banned from switching employers..)