Jury hears closing arguments in Zenimax-Facebook battle over VR headset Rift
28 Jan 2017
The legal battle between Facebook and Zenimax may soon be over, after weeks of courtroom conflict. Attorneys for both sides pitched closing arguments yesterday for the jury to decide if Facebook-owned Oculus created its virtual reality headset with intellectual property brelonging to Zenimax.
The jury's deliberations started Thursday and the final verdict in the case, is expected on 30 January.
Zenimax, which first accused Oculus of stealing trade secrets and copyrighted code in 2014, asked the jury, in closing arguments, to award it $2 billion in compensation and $2 billion in punitive damages, reported digital news publication Polygon.
"We're here because the defendants stole something very valuable," said Zenimax attorney Anthony Sammi, who maintained the company's claim that the technology powering Oculus' Rift headset was illegitimately obtained and used by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and CTO John Carmack.
Sammi's arguments centred around emails and exchanges between Carmack and Oculus engineers that supported the company's claims, and expert testimony that accused Oculus of willful evidence destruction by erasing the hard drives shortly before producing the drives in court.
According to additional reports from GameSpot, Zenimax had also asked Oculus executives for a total of $734.4 million, which included $427 million from former CEO Brendan Iribe, $206 million from Luckey, and $101.4 million from Carmack.
Law360 reported the courtroom discussions as follows: ''ZeniMax alleges that the entirety of Oculus is built on a foundation of stolen code and stolen ideas and that the innovations the company has since reached would not be possible without modifications Carmack made to a prototype virtual reality headset built by Luckey, and without two virtual reality versions of video games coded by Carmack to function on the modified Oculus headset.''
Facebook and Oculus continued to maintain their position that, while Carmack played an important role at Oculus, the VR headset itself was the product of technology created at Oculus. Facebook had denied Oculus used any code Carmack developed while at ZeniMax (See: Zuckerberg defends Facebook's VR headset in Dallas court).
