Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify in an ongoing lawsuit filed against Oculus, the virtual reality headset manufacturer the company purchased last year for $400 million and 2.4 million Facebook shares.
ZeniMax, the publisher behind the iconic Doom franchise and id Software, claims that Oculus CTO John Carmack stole the company’s intellectual property when he left for the Facebook-owned virtual reality company back in 2013. At one point Carmack was working at ZeniMax and Oculus at the same time, though he says this was not a violation of his employment contract with the Doom publisher.
“One of the biggest technology heists ever”
Zuckerberg is set to testify tomorrow (January 17th), with Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey testifying later this week. ZeniMax is seeking $2 billion in damages, almost double the amount Facebook paid for Oculus. ZeniMax claims that Facebook was aware of Carmack’s wrongdoings when it bought Oculus, with the company’s lawyer calling the situation “one of the biggest technology heists ever,” during the case’s opening statement.
Specifically ZeniMax says that Carmack copied thousands of documents and files from a ZeniMax computer to a USB storage device, all related to a virtual reality project ZeniMax was working on. On the other side of the argument, Facebook says that ZeniMax’s claims are without merit.
In an interview with Business Insider, an Oculus spokesperson said “we’re disappointed that another company is using wasteful litigation to attempt to take credit for technology that it did not have the vision, expertise, or patience to build.”
[source]Business Insider[/source]
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