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ZeniMax Is Suing Samsung After Winning Its Case Against Oculus (cnn.com)
Games company ZeniMax successfully sued Facebook-owned Oculus for $500 million earlier this year, and now it has a new target in sight: Samsung. The company has filed a new lawsuit over Samsung's Gear VR headset, claiming that "Samsung knowingly profited from Oculus technology that was first developed at ZeniMax, then misappropriated by Oculus executive John Carmack," reports The Verge. From the report: Carmack, whose company id Software was acquired by ZeniMax in 2009, was one of the driving forces behind the Gear VR. While the headset was released by Samsung, it's described as "powered by Oculus," with heavy software optimizations developed by Carmack. But the lawsuit alleges that Carmack owed much of his success at Oculus to software he developed as part of a team at ZeniMax. Among other things, the Texas court filing claims that Carmack secretly brought Oculus (and former ZeniMax) employee Matt Hooper into id Software's offices to develop an "attack plan" for mobile VR, which Oculus would later take to Samsung. The Samsung Gear VR was also built on some of the same code as the Oculus Rift, which was the subject of ZeniMax's earlier lawsuit. ZeniMax's basic argument is that Samsung would have been aware of the lawsuit against Oculus, which was filed during the initial development of the Gear VR. But "Samsung continued to develop the Gear VR with full knowledge of ZeniMax's allegations and without obtaining any right or permission from ZeniMax to use any of its copyrights or other confidential information." The new lawsuit officially accuses Samsung of copyright infringement for using ZeniMax VR code in the Gear VR, as well as trade secret misappropriation, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment.
So essentially, Carmack will never (or at least until certain patents run out) be able to work on VR again because anything he comes up with now builds on what he already knows, and he knows that stuff from developing what this Z-something now owns? Harsh.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm convinced the boardroom owners of Zenimax and whatever rabid lawyers they employ just get a hardon from lawsuits. The "victory" against Oculus was actually against Palmer and another Oculus employee personally for breaking NDA's, which they did. The charges against Carmack and for "stolen technology" were all declared as not guilty.
So the "victory" provides them no legal backing nor precedent for this new suit, but they're doing it anyway because Zenimax is run by some crazed bullies that probably wank it to thoughts of bossing poor people around. Or they literally just hire hookers and then boss them around, I dunno.
This sounds like the perfect example of the proper use of intellectual property. I'm not privy to whether Zenimax's case is bogus or not-- I'm taking the trial outcome at face value. But if Carmack signed IP agreements when he was a zenimax employee and then used those for personal gain he was the one perfroming unjust enrichment. The whole point of investing in IP is to hope to strike it rich. If some one takes your crown jewels the law needs to support that.
It doesn't matter that you might feel like information wants to be free. We don't live in that world. We live in the world where the creation of property rights creates liquidity and a market. In that world property rights mean money flows in to back the improvement of good ideas into products that are widely beneficial to society. Interestingly we also live in a world where we do appreciate the tradeoff that withholding IP is also bad and so we let those property rights expire as well. Free might sound nice but it means many good ideas will never be developed without capital.
Now it might well be this is a bogus court decision. That's a whole different question.
But I don't see this as a patent trolling. They invested to create those ideas.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.