Executive John Carmack has disputed claims that he came up with the Oculus Rift using code that he had worked on while still with ZeniMax. Carmack spoke out against the claims on his Facebook page last Thursday.
Oculus versus ZeniMax. The lawsuit filed by Zenimax against the virtual reality company ended last February 1, 2017, with the former being awarded US$500 million. This is after the jury had concluded that the company developed its virtual reality product with "non-literal" copies of code that the renowned programmer had written while still working for ZeniMax.
The same jury, however, had cleared Carmack of many other accusations from ZeniMax such as one that he had allegedly deleted data to cover his tracks in copying the code for the company's virtual reality product. In addition, the executive was not found to be personally liable for the US$500 million award. It is instead shared among the company itself, co-founder Luckey, and former CEO Brendan Iribe.
A non-literal copy, according to legal terms, is a copy that is substantially similar to the original which in this case is the Oculus Rift code. An expert's testimony during the hearings stated that a non-literal copy would be something like a copy of the story with new character names to differentiate it from the original which constitutes copyright infringement.
Carmack wrote in response to the claims, "I agree; that is the literary equivalent of changing the variable names when you copy source code... However, if you abstract Harry Potter up a notch or two, you get Campbell's Hero's Journey, which also maps well onto Star Wars and hundreds of other stories. These are not copyright infringement."
The virtual reality company initially stated that it, together with its founder, had invested a lot of time and wealth into their flagship virtual reality product. Oculus had expressed disappointment at the "wasteful litigation" taken advantage of by another company to "take credit". It is currently owned by Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO and several other tech experts had also appeared to offer testimonies in defense of the company
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