Judge Denies Facebook and Oculus VR’s Motions to Dismiss ZeniMax Lawsuit

A U.S. District Judge dismissed Oculus VR and Facebook's motions to dismiss ZeniMax's federal lawsuit against them over accusations of stolen trade secrets.

According to Polygon, U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis denied Facebook, Oculus VR and company founder Palmer Luckey's motions to dismiss ZeniMax Media's federal lawsuit against them. This means the lawsuit is going forward and will be hitting the courts with Oculus VR on one end and ZeniMax Media on the other. We first started covering this story in May 2014, when Oculus VR was being sued by ZeniMax for misappropriated trade secrets.

ZeniMax claims that legendary game developer John Carmack, known for his work on Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom, stole ZeniMax's pertinent and copyrighted intellectual property when he jumped ship from ZeniMax Media after finding out they wouldn't be supporting the Oculus Rift VR headset. Carmack joined Oculus VR in mid-2013 as their Chief Technology Officer after working on ZeniMax's yet-to-be-revealed VR project. ZeniMax remains adamant that Carmack took their tech with him to Oculus VR, while Carmack claims that the work he did wasn't patented. Carmack also said that ZeniMax might own the code he wrote, but they don't own his industry know-how of virtual reality tech.

On top of this, six of ZeniMax's other former employees now work at Oculus VR. ZeniMax claims that Oculus is benefiting from its investments into VR tech, and that rather than agreeing to giving ZeniMax a 2 percent equity stake, Oculus began stealing ZeniMax's employees from them.

Mind you, earlier this year we reported that another company is suing Luckey and Oculus VR. Luckey was hired by Total Recall Technologies (seriously, that's its name) years ago to develop a head-mounted display, and that the feedback and information he got from their prototype headset was used in developing the Oculus Rift. Luckey believes that both companies are simply money hungry after Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.

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