Zenimax Claims Oculus Rift Tech Stolen

Tech company Oculus VR has issued a statement to IGN in response to claims from Bethesda parent company Zenimax that its intellectual property was stolen to develop the upcoming Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming headset.

Oculus VR said it is "disappointed but not surprised by Zenimax’s actions" and that it will prove that Zenimax's claims are false. It issued a series of key points on the issue, which you can read below.

Zenimax's comments are as follows:

·         There is not a line of Zenimax code or any of its technology in any Oculus products.

·         John Carmack did not take any intellectual property from Zenimax.

·         Zenimax has misstated the purposes and language of the Zenimax non-disclosure agreement that Palmer Luckey signed.

·         A key reason that John permanently left Zenimax in August of 2013 was that Zenimax prevented John from working on VR, and stopped investing in VR games across the company.

·         Zenimax canceled VR support for Doom 3 BFG when Oculus refused Zenimax’s demands for a non-dilutable equity stake in Oculus.

·         Zenimax did not pursue claims against Oculus for IP or technology, Zenimax has never contributed any IP or technology to Oculus, and only after the Facebook deal was announced has Zenimax now made these claims through its lawyers.

·         Despite the fact that the full source code for the Oculus SDK is available online (developer.oculusvr.com), Zenimax has never identified any ‘stolen’ code or technology.

Carmack tweeted on May 1 that there are no lines of code in Oculus that were developed under his contract with Zenimax. News broke last week that Maryland-based Zenimax - of whom Carmack's old company id Software is a subsidiary - issued legal letters to Oculus VR and Facebook, which recently acquired Oculus VR.