Zenimax vs Oculus Lawsuit

Do you have some personal attachment to this case that you aren't sharing? Because the way you've been axe-grinding over a case where the details aren't fully known seems weird to me.
 
Do you have some personal attachment to this case that you aren't sharing? Because the way you've been axe-grinding over a case where the details aren't fully known seems weird to me.
Please tell me more about that....
Thread title : "Rift, Vive, and Virtual Reality" Sub-Forum "VR and AR". The most prominent VR company is sued by one of the biggest game publisher for $4B and I post about it with my opinion on the case which, contrary to what you said, most of the details have been known about for years in part in Zenimax's court filings, Valve employees public statements, industry veterans chichat, the 100s of posts on the MTBS3D forums, friends of mine in the industry etc...I mean practically everything about this particular case was publically known to anyone who took the time to do a little research or who has been following VR in the past 5/6 years... THe outcome of the case is pointless in the grand scheme of things but it's always interesting to see how shady VC funding is. Same thing applies to Magic Leap who has recently been outed 2 months ago.
 
If you knew practically everything about this case then I'm not entirely sure why you're having to use so much hyperbole to make your points, or having such difficulty calmly laying out which particular deeds were done by Oculus, Palmer, or other actors that you feel were ethically wrong, and what relevance those played in this particular trial. It seems to me to be an emotional reaction rather than a rational one.
 
If you knew practically everything about this case then I'm not entirely sure why you're having to use so much hyperbole to make your points, or having such difficulty calmly laying out which particular deeds were done by Oculus, Palmer, or other actors that you feel were ethically wrong, and what relevance those played in this particular trial. It seems to me to be an emotional reaction rather than a rational one.
You seem to be particularly hell-bent on trying to discern, for god knows what reason, my "emotions" here. Are you a shrink or something? http://www.psychforums.com/ would be a better place for these kind of discussions if that's what you are after. Anyway, feel free to continue to derail the thread or maybe send me an PM if you are that much interested about my "emotions" ?
 
Probably read this before you go there : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias

Well, it's known that Palmer was always scornful of megacorps in early days when he was a fledging internet sensation ,he has numerous tirade posts over at the now empty and devoid mtbs3d forums (where the "rift" was born) then when he met his new friends, his behaviour quickly tipped towards the opposite end, so afterall maybe it's him who deserves the scorn (big fuss, big FOMO & get rich in the process ),
though Brendan Iribe doesn't seem like your ordinary VC ,he's a "programmer" , looks like he was co-founder of Scaleform (another sold company), makes you wonder if they became great friends with Palmer due to that apparent salesmanship skill.
 
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Palmer Luckey not giving a fuck about the NDA he signed with Zenimax = $500M http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14474198/oculus-lawsuit-verdict

"Of the $500 million, Oculus is paying out $200 million for breaking the NDA and $50 million for copyright infringement. Oculus and Luckey each have to pay $50 million for false designation. And Iribe has to pay $150 million for the same, final count."

So basically Oculus were found innocent of all charges brought on by Zenimax except for that involving the breaking of NDA.

Looking at what was said on both sides. Zenimax contends that trade secrets were stolen. Oculus counters that Zenimax filed the lawsuit because they couldn't force Oculus into a partnership deal via threats. Yada yada.

Yawn. Hopefully it's finally over although it appears that Oculus might appeal the NDA ruling, while Zenimax might attempt to file an injunction against further sales of the Oculus Rift. Neither of which I believe have a leg to stand on considering the rulings from this case.

Regards,
SB
 
Here's a good summary on how Valve totally screwed up by not making Oculus sign an NDA and how this whole VR investment craze spun out of control with the FB acquisition which lead to other shady stuff like Magic Leap's VC funding which at this point in time is looking more & more like a fraud (for some good laughs here's Magic Leap CEO spreading FUD about Microsoft's HoloLens just after its unveiling: here & here)

Inside The Growing Rift Between Valve And Oculus

The company who would have had the strongest case against Oculus would have been Valve..but they totally screwed up by not making Luckey sign anything (which Zenimax did and now got $500M for it).

For some totally odd reason Carmack decided to defend himself on Facebook today by posting the following even though Oculus can still appeal the case & Zenimax is threatening an injunction (I'm fairly sure that Facebook legal team would have probably ordered/advised him to not say anything for the time being...especially given Zenimax's answer below):

The Zenimax vs Oculus trial is over. I disagreed with their characterization, misdirection, and selective omissions. I never tried to hide or wipe any evidence, and all of my data is accounted for, contrary to some stories being spread.

Being sued sucks. For the most part, the process went as I expected.

The exception was the plaintiff’s expert that said Oculus’s implementations of the techniques at issue were “non-literally copied” from the source code I wrote while at Id Software.

This is just not true. The authors at Oculus never had access to the Id C++ VR code, only a tiny bit of plaintext shader code from the demo. I was genuinely interested in hearing how the paid expert would spin a web of code DNA between completely unrelated codebases.

Early on in his testimony, I wanted to stand up say “Sir! As a man of (computer) science, I challenge you to defend the efficacy of your methodology with data, including false positive and negative rates.” After he had said he was “Absolutely certain there was non-literal copying” in several cases, I just wanted to shout “You lie!”. By the end, after seven cases of “absolutely certain”, I was wondering if gangsters had kidnapped his grandchildren and were holding them for ransom.

If he had said “this supports a determination of”, or dozens of other possible phrases, then it would have fit in with everything else, but I am offended that a distinguished academic would say that his ad-hoc textual analysis makes him “absolutely certain” of anything. That isn’t the language of scientific inquiry.

The notion of non-literal copying is probably delicious to many lawyers, since a sufficient application of abstraction and filtering can show that just about everything is related. There are certainly some cases where it is true, such as when you translate a book into another language, but copyright explicitly does not apply to concepts or algorithms, so you can’t abstract very far from literal copying before comparing. As with many legal questions, there isn’t a bright clear line where you need to stop.

The analogy that the expert gave to the jury was that if someone wrote a book that was basically Harry Potter with the names changed, it would still be copyright infringement. 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.

There are objective measures of code similarity that can be quoted, like the edit distance between abstract syntax trees, but here the expert hand identified the abstract steps that the code fragments were performing, made slides that nobody in the courtroom could actually read, filled with colored boxes outlining the purportedly analogous code in each case. In some cases, the abstractions he came up with were longer than the actual code they were supposed to be abstracting.

It was ridiculous. Even without being able to read the code on the slides, you could tell the steps varied widely in operation count, were often split up and in different order, and just looked different.

The following week, our side’s code expert basically just took the same slides their expert produced (the judge had to order them to be turned over) and blew each of them up across several slides so you could actually read them. I had hoped that would have demolished the credibility of the testimony, but I guess I overestimated the impact.

Notably, I wasn’t allowed to read the full expert report, only listen to him in trial, and even his expert testimony in trial is under seal, rather than in the public record. This is surely intentional -- if the code examples were released publicly, the internet would have viciously mocked the analysis. I still have a level of morbid curiosity about the several hundred-page report.

The expert witness circuit is surely tempting for many academics, since a distinguished expert can get paid $600+ an hour to prepare a weighty report that supports a lawyer’s case. I don’t have any issue with that, but testifying in court as an expert should be as much a part of your permanent public record as the journal papers you publish. In many cases, the consequences are significant. There should be a danger to your reputation if you are imprudent.

It didn't' take long for Zenimax's lawyers to release this following statement:

"In addition to expert testimony finding both literal and non-literal copying, Oculus programmers themselves admitted using Zenimax’s copyrighted code (one saying he cut and pasted it into the Oculus SDK), and [Oculus VR co-founder] Brendan Iribe, in writing, requested a license for the 'source code shared by Carmack' they needed for the Oculus Rift. Not surprisingly, the jury found Zenimax code copyrights were infringed. The Oculus Rift was built on a foundation of Zenimax technology."

"As for the denial of wiping, the Court’s independent expert found 92 percent of Carmack’s hard drive was wiped—all data was permanently destroyed, right after Carmack got notice of the lawsuit, and that his affidavit denying the wiping was false. Those are the hard facts."
QUOTE]
 
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Never seen such bad losers as Oculus and Carmack..

Zenimax isn't exactly smelling of roses here either. It's all up to personal preference who you want to believe. The Jury obviously sided with Oculus on most of the damaging claims that Zenimax brought in the case and awarded just 500 million USD out of the 2 billion USD that Zenimax was seeking. I wouldn't say there were any winners in this. Both Zenimax and Oculus won some and lost some. Zenimax for being greedy and Oculus for breaking NDA.

Side rant, below.

The funny thing here is that out of the 3 major VR players, Oculus and Sony are the main reasons that VR has any chance of success at all due to large monetary investments into game development. Valve only recently started a development fund, and it's absolutely miniscule compared to the money that Oculus and Sony are giving to developers. And you can tell by the quality of VR games being released on each platform. Developers for the most part can afford to develop for VR games in the same way they can for traditional gaming.

Valve and HTC may make good hardware, but they are doing very little to actually try to make VR a success. And yet, Valve gets all the good publicity on PC among the internet plebs for doing almost nothing to make VR gaming a lasting thing.

Regards,
SB
 
Zenimax isn't exactly smelling of roses here either. It's all up to personal preference who you want to believe. The Jury obviously sided with Oculus on most of the damaging claims that Zenimax brought in the case and awarded just 500 million USD out of the 2 billion USD that Zenimax was seeking. I wouldn't say there were any winners in this. Both Zenimax and Oculus won some and lost some. Zenimax for being greedy and Oculus for breaking NDA.

Side rant, below.

The funny thing here is that out of the 3 major VR players, Oculus and Sony are the main reasons that VR has any chance of success at all due to large monetary investments into game development. Valve only recently started a development fund, and it's absolutely miniscule compared to the money that Oculus and Sony are giving to developers. And you can tell by the quality of VR games being released on each platform. Developers for the most part can afford to develop for VR games in the same way they can for traditional gaming.

Valve and HTC may make good hardware, but they are doing very little to actually try to make VR a success. And yet, Valve gets all the good publicity on PC among the internet plebs for doing almost nothing to make VR gaming a lasting thing.

Regards,
SB


Facebook is actually starting to show signs of losing faith in Oculus, so those $500M may be already showing their marks.
As for Valve, I don't get their attitude with hardware. The only thing they really held on to was the Steam controller and maybe Steam Link (though this last one is a bit of a low-effort product IMO).
The Steam Machines were all way too expensive so I can only guess they tanked hard and no one hears from those anymore. Vive looks like it has 90% effort from HTC and 10% effort from Valve. They don't really make games anymore so one has to wonder if the company isn't simply being kept profitable due to Steam's sheer popularity.
Gabe Newell said in the past that they would only develop new games when a new gaming platform/experience appeared that would justify the effort. The Vive was released almost a year ago and there's not even a hint for anything from Valve. There's that small Portal demo and that's it.
Why the hell was Valve involved with the Vive if not to release system-seller games for the platform? They thought just making the Vive available to purchase through Steam would make it a success? As if they didn't learn that from Steam Machines before?

To be honest, Sony is looking like the last bastion of VR. At least until those $300 headsets from Asus&Friends start coming out.
 
Valve just announced this week that it is (for the first time in nearly 10 years) developing 3 new games (real games not experiences like The Lab)..and they are VR exclusive. Valve is also the biggest contributor to the VR platform with its OpenVR API which has also been brought to the Krhonos Group to become the industry standard...the notion that Valve isn't investing in VR is quite ridiculous given that they are actually the main driving force right with the most robust tracking tech, industry standard API. Oh and the HTC Vive (which is not 90% HTC 10% Valve at all..there are countless reports & articles published detailing how the partnership to place in a hurry once Oculus jump ship to Facebook with Valve's prototype..) has been outselling the Rift 2-1....
Anyway...3 new Valve games in development...exclusive for VR..
 
I had written that post about half a day before the 3 games news came up. Up until that point, Valve's commitment on VR was questionable at best.

3 full games for VR is great! It'll definitely give a boost on VR's selling points.
 
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