News Oculus VR infringed Zenimax copyright, jury finds

"The company is to pay Zenimax $200 million for breach of the NDA and a further $20 million for copyright infringement"
"while Oculus and Palmer Luckey personally will be made to pay out $50 million each"

The company has to pay and then oculus has to pay 'personally' - while not actually being a person.

To me it sounds a bit extreme, 320 million, but meh.

 

I expect the haggling and appeals will results in Facebook/Occulus settling with Zenimax for substantially less. If Zenimax gets more than $200 million by the end I'd be very surprised.

 

The 'trade secrets' complaint was quashed entirely, the the remaining judgement was between trademark infringement - Zenimax's claims aren't all that clear, but they seem to either be complaining that Oculus represented Doom/Rage to be theirs (which is rather silly), or that Oculus claimed they were working with Zenimax when they were not (except them working with Carmack is a core part of their case, so ), and that it was somehow damaging for Zenimax to be associated with Oculus - and copyright infringement; except the copyright infringement was based around the AFC test (looking for code written differently that does the same function) rather than any actual copying of code. And it would probably be hard to find a computer scientist willing to claim the AFC test actually makes sense for copyright (rather than patent infringement) who isn't getting $600/hr expert witness fees.

Some of the trademark claims may make it through at reduced damages (it'd be hard for Zenimax to claim that people were less likely to buy Doom 3 BFG if they thought they could later play it in VR), but now that Zenimax have shown their hand (or lackthereof) on the copyright claims it will be much easier to counter them on appeal.