Facebook and ZeniMax bury hatchet over stolen Oculus Rift code issue

Facebook and ZeniMax have reached a settlement that will bury the legal battle ax over the Oculus Rift. ZeniMax claimed that the Oculus Rift could only come about because former ZeniMax employees stole code and used it at Oculus.

CNBC reports that the settlement was reached on Wednesday, with no details about the settlement agreement being released. For example, it is unknown how much Oculus, which was annexed by Facebook in 2014, pays ZeniMax. Such a payment is obvious, since a US judge ruled in June that Oculus had to pay $250 million to ZeniMax. Both sides report that they are pleased that this matter is now over.

The legal battle over the alleged stolen technology from ZeniMax that contributed to the creation of the Oculus Rift lasted about four years. In 2014, ZeniMax sued Oculus, claiming it owns the rights to the technology behind the Oculus Rift. ZeniMax sued Facebook for $6 billion, and the company also wanted hundreds of millions of dollars from Oculus technology boss John Carmack, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and former Oculus VR director Brendan Iribe.

The role of John Carmack is crucial in this case. He was an employee of id Software, of which ZeniMax Media is the parent company. Carmack, according to ZeniMax, wrote the code behind the Oculus Rift and brought it to Oculus when he joined id Software in 2013, after leaving id Software. Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 for approximately $3 billion.

Facebook, Oculus and carmack have always denied that code written by Carmack was used in the development of the Oculus Rift, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized during a January 2017 testimony in a US courtroom. According to Zuckerberg, the technology behind the Oculus Rift was not fully developed when Facebook bought Oculus.