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Oculus Founder Hit With Lawsuit
An anonymous reader writes: Palmer Luckey, founder of VR headset-maker Oculus, has been sued by a company accusing him of taking their confidential information and passing it off as his own. Total Recall Technologies, based in Hawaii, claims it hired Luckey in 2011 to build a head-mounted display. Part of that employment involved Luckey signing a confidentiality agreement. In August, 2012, Luckey launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift headset, and Facebook bought his company last year for $2 billion. TRT is seeking compensatory and punitive damages (PDF).
You'd think they might have thought about suing him, oh I don't know, when everyone was talking about the facebook buyout?
Why wait an extra few years?
Are you feeling Luckey, PUNK?
If this is true, why didn't he get hit with a law suit earlier?
Kind of Ironic that Zuckerburg got a similar lawsuit after facebook became popular and now FB owns Oculus
Sounds like they're a little butt hurt because their product... well, I've never heard of it.
A confidentiality agreement is NOT a non-compete agreement which I doubt they could really enforce anyway since a lot of states refuse to recognize them.
As long as he didn't steal anything from them or give out their internal secrets nothing will come of this and he may even get them to cover his legal expenses in the end. I'd bet $5 that this lawsuit is more about getting their name heard than anything else.
And life is like a cake.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Ah... Okay, all of a sudden the Facebook acquisition makes perfect sense. Mark Zuckerburg is just buying into projects he can relate to.
He didn't give hinself shock treatment to erase his memory of the time he worked with us and he failed to deny that he existed during the years of 2011 and 2012. Even though he didn't steal our IP (or we would have sued for that), we want to sue anyway because we fumbled the future and he didn't!
I googled the life out of this and could not find them. I did find a company by that name in Panaji, Goa, India, but I do not see how they may be related. I'm puzzled.
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
Did the 3d power or the custom display tech required for HTC/oculus exist in 2010-2012? I mean head mount displays with len's been around but i dont think any of them worked worth a crap. i dont believe they have a leg to stand on seeing how both oculus/valve had some of the best of the best work on there setups just not one person
Patent trolls are like pimps without the cool clothes and '72 Riviera with fur-lined windows.
They both make their money off other people's work.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Total Recall could, of course, license the tech to Facebook, and probably make a tidy profit while doing so.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I was a backer. Were you? Or do you feel compelling to complain on behalf of other people?
I got the main thing I backed it for - a dev kit.
Facebook buying them means an investment in learning to program for the Rift is probably 1000x more useful than it would have been otherwise.
I understand people are wary of Facebook, and for good reason. But I have seen huge upsides with pretty much no downside since Facebook bought the company.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Luckey just lost it.
Should have read the fine print of the contract.
No Linux support? Take him to the cleaners and wipe them out.
It is pretty easy for the plaintiff to claim they provided the IP that the defendant used. However, people like the defendant get hired because
they have skills and knowledge in the first place to bring to a company. That skillset and knowhow does not pass to an employer, provided
some evidence can be found that the defendant knew the "secrets" before he signed on. While there are often provisions where a hire is supposed
to list all prior information, in practice these can never be complete lists.
A company which could not get a working product and now wants to cash in on prior and subsequent work by its one time employee
has a strong motive to claim all sorts of exclusivity to which it is not entitled. In view of some similar cases I've known of (where the
defendant was not well-heeled), I have much suspicion this happened here too.
It is a lie?
When the money wasn't there nobody cared, nome sane?
PalmerTech as he exists on the MTBS boards has a demonstrated development cycle on the rift stretching back to 2009.
Arguably the most important developments were made throughout 2010 with the PR1 concept.
This includes documented evidence of all the major design elements that are evident in the rift to date.
Unless he sold them the IP, then they have no leg to stand on.
Nothing like a beat up to hide the facts.
Source: 5 seconds with google.
OOOOHHHHHH!
-Andrew Dice Clay
The Oculus Rift, and subsequent involvement by John Carmack, and others, was publicized in the gaming press, a major market for 3D tech. There were people playing the Doom 3 BFG edition with headsets in early 2013. Total Recall Technologies could have been publicizing Palmer Luckey stole their intellectual property, and that they were the ones to work with in 3D headsets. The people at Total Recall Technologies could have collaborated with John Carmack, and others, and their company would be the ones making a future 3D headset.
But, if you want money, and don't want to work, then waiting for the other guy to make money, IF he makes money, is a very good strategy.
What? Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
- John Belushi as Bluto
I've been stung by so many kickstarters. These guys at least send me something that kind of worked, and I was able to write some OpenGL toys around it, so I had my fun at least. But I'm really done with them, and with all other kickstarters/indiegogo/whatever.
In related news, Total Recall (a Hawaii based company) recently got a major infusion of cash and advice about ignoring facts from two brothers which one of the company's consultants called Winkelvii. Some of the apparent advice included such gems as "its ok, broad ideas uttered in a drunken stupor caught in a friends 'drunk cam' can be considered prior art and are as good as finished product."
Since when did the Germans bomb Pearl Harbor? Did USA retaliate against the wrong country?
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
It did it all, just like Oculus.
But 1/10000th the cpu power, and 1/10th the res.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The timing isn't all that unusual: TRT's patent just issued, roughly 4 years after the provisional was filed. The full application filing date is Nov 2013.
https://www.google.com/patents/US9007430
They filed their app before they hired Luckey (Aug 2011) , although the complaint says they were talking to him earlier.
"This application is a continuation of International Application No. PCT/US2012/039572, filed May 25, 2012, which claims priority to U.S Provisional Application No. 61/490,656, filed May 27, 2011."
Ignore all the field of invention and abstract.. Although the abstract talks about capturing images, etc., there's nothing in the claims about it
Look at the claims:
And the first claim is
1. A system for creating a navigable, panoramic three-dimensional virtual reality environment, comprising...
Purely the display device.. Yep, I'll bet the Oculus Rift "reads on" the claims quite nicely.
8.A non-transitory computer usable medium comprising a computer readable program code embodied therein, the computer readable program code adapted to be executed to implement a method for rendering video image data to create a navigable, panoramic three-dimensional virtual reality environment comprising the steps of..
For Oculus to "pick" Facebook to take them over. Mark has history at being good at this (Hellooo Winklevoss twins)
That's the kind of intentionally harmful delay for which the laches defense was designed.
As another poster had already mentioned, what's the point of sue *before* he got the money?
To enjoin him from further use of trade secrets so that you can sell your product without fear of unfair competition from his.
I hope it kneecaps them, serves them right for pulling the rug out from people when they gave the impression it was going to be open source.
There is no thing called IP, it doesn't exist. Never has. Never will.
Then how would you describe the legal effect of 47 USC 230(e)(2)? "Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property."
It's like that famous saying, you know, "If you build it, they will sue."