ZeniMax requests injunction against Facebook's Oculus

Weeks after a US court ordered Facebook's virtual reality subsidiary Oculus to pay ZeniMax Media $500 million in damages, the game developer has requested an injunction that could dent sales and usage of Oculus' Rift and Gear VR headsets.

A Dallas court ordered Facebook's executives to pay ZeniMax Media $500 million in damages over copyright infringement and violation of non-disclosure agreement.

Based on that verdict, ZeniMax asked a judge for an injunction against Oculus using the copyrighted materials, Financial Times reported on Monday.

The copyrighted materials include its "VR implantation code" and "VR testbed code", in products including its system software for both its PC and mobile headsets, as well as the tools used by developers to create games and apps for its devices.

ZeniMax argued that Oculus "would never have existed" if Palmer Luckey, the VR company's founder had not infringed its intellectual property.

"Defendants should not be permitted to continue using or distributing products that infringe ZeniMax's copyrights -- including Oculus products that use code derived from or developed with reference to ZeniMax's code -- as expressly covered by the NDA (non-disclosure agreement)," the software publisher's lawyers were quoted as saying.

If the injunction is granted, Oculus may have to rewrite the infringing code from scratch or obtain a license from ZeniMax to use it.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier denied the allegations of stealing the ZeniMax technology and said that it used its own technology to create the Oculus VR headset.

According to a report in Variety on Thursday, ZeniMax was seeking as much as $4 billion in the case.

Facebook bought Oculus VR for more than $2 billion in 2014 and the dispute started just after the acquisition when ZeniMax Media sued Oculus of stealing important elements of its technology.

--IANS

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