Zenimax suing Occulus: is Zenimax a patent troll now?

I think it just goes to show the messed up culture of employers claiming all software made by an employee as their own.
There needs to be some common sense enforced by the government.

Concerning the case itself, even if they have used some tech belonging to ID then they should work out a reasonable fee to licence the tech.
Something tells me that they are asking for much more than anything within the realm of "reasonable".

Basically if Zenimax aren't willing to be reasonable about this then i say let them take on Facebooks lawyers and let the courts decide.

 

Why am I reading the above text inside my head in a monotonous, stereotypical James Bondsey Russian/German Badguy Accent type voice...?

Probably because the kind of people who created that text are only found inside a villain's Lair, of the kind that is found either inside a volcano, or submersible under the ocean.

Now, we're just waiting for the Hero to arrive and blow the shit out of their little hideout, leaving the villains plus their henchmen buried under millions of tons of water or lava.

 

By how they phrased it it looks like you are right, that they want to take ownership of work Carmack did on his own free time.

Sadly, a lot of companies have clauses that give them ownership of work done by their employers outside of working hours, and it's probably legal. I've even heard stories of minimum wage employees at Radio Shack losing rights to any invention they make while employed there.

But in this case ZeniMax shouldn't have allowed Carmack to simultaneously work for Occulus in the first place and should have made him choose.

I for one would never work for a company that requires something like this. And it's amazing to think that Carmack would go from the position he had in iD to being this subservient after a buyout. I wonder if the terms were very clear.

 

I bet a good amount of the mess is due to this fact.

Since they allowed him to work on the stuff while still employed, I bet there's a chance some he may have used resources that Zenimax for Occulus while working for both. If you're working on something for another company, you really need to be careful not to do it on your first employers time or using their resources.

This whole thing comes across as spiteful to me. My guess there was a fallout over something and Zenimax wants to get back at him.

 

I think the overlap in employment is being used Zenimax to claim Carmack was operating as a consultant using information and research results from Zenimax team work product in his advice.
The exact nature of what Carmack contributed is unclear, and since this is now a PR and legal duel both sides will be inflating or minimizing how material a role was played by Carmack's involvment or other exchanged information between Zenimax and what became Occulus.

Unclear at this point, given the PR fluff, is whether Zenimax is also implying that Carmack should be blamed for not wiping his brain after leaving the company.

 

I wonder what this means for Armadillo Aerospace.

 

Look up the Prey 2 fiasco. They don't treat their studios well, they pull shit like this... They're basically EA but much smaller.

 

Prey2 fiasco, what was that, now again? Like, they tossed the entire first game, including the main character himself, backstory, setting, variable gravity, everything, and created an entirely new game* which had nothing whatsoever in common other than the name, then they cancelled that game and fired the whole development team or something like that. Did I get things right?

*With a whitewashed main character this time no less, none of that indian hippie shit. Because people don't like that, I suppose they reasoned.

 

It's being wound down, or has already completed the process of shutting down.
Without outside investment it will remain inactive.

 

Zenimax starved the developers (Human Head) of funding in an attempt to force an acquisition of the studio on the cheap.

It was not the first time.

Or the second.

It is exactly the behavior you would expect from a company founded and run by a lawyer banned from the banking industry for his involvement in "the largest bank fraud in world financial history."