Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared in court to testify on behalf of the social media giant’s virtual reality company Oculus Rift on Tuesday, as it was accused of stealing trade secrets from Id Software, maker of the Doom and Quake games.
“I’m here because I believe they’re false,” Zuckerberg said of the charges, “and it’s important to testify to that.” He characterized the plaintiffs as opportunists: “It’s pretty common when you announce a big deal that people just come out of the woodwork and claim they own some part of the deal.”
“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,” an Oculus spokesperson told the Guardian. Representatives from Zenimax media, owner of Id and chief plaintiff, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zenimax alleges that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and Id co-founder John Carmack – now chief technical officer at Oculus – tweaked the software that operates the Oculus while Carmack was still under contract at Id and then destroyed evidence of the collaboration. Luckey is also accused of using Zenimax games to promote the Rift during its Kickstarter campaign without permission. Oculus was acquired by Facebook in 2014 at a cost of $2bn.
Attorneys grilled Zuckerberg about whether or not his company had done the necessary due diligence before the sale. The court heard that Amin Zoufonoun, Facebook’s head of corporate development, warned Zuckerberg that Oculus Rift’s team had told Facebook things that were “simply not true”.
Demos of the headset impressed enough reporters and tech executives that Oculus’s 2012 Kickstarter campaign raised $2.4m, after which Zenimax demanded compensation from Oculus, including an equity stake. The subsequent discussions ended in stalemate: Oculus refusing to give Zenimax equity without payment, Zenimax refusing to pay cash. Several Zenimax employees left the company for Oculus, including Carmack.
Carmack’s gifts are central to the suit: in one exhibit, the company has included a tweet from the venerable developer reading, “When you are in a hurry, and you know you wrote the exact needed code (well!) at a previous job, reimplementation grates.”
When you are in a hurry, and you know you wrote the exact needed code (well!) at a previous job, reimplementation grates.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April 19, 2014
Carmack was associated with the Rift from the headset’s earliest days; during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2013, the company held private briefings for press and other interested parties in a suite at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, where Luckey demonstrated what was not much more than a Galaxy Note 2 duct-taped to a plastic headset with what he called “some hacky driver fixes in [Microsoft rendering software] DirectX” at the time. Zuckerberg said in court that there was “no shared code [from Carmack’s contract work with Zenimax] in what we do”.
Reuters contributed to this report
