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ZeniMax and Oculus settle VR IP appeal

ZeniMax and Oculus settle VR IP appeal

Bethesda parent company ZeniMax and Facebook-owned Oculus have settled their appeals in the duo's VR IP legal drama.

That's according to Law360, which reports that the companies announced they had settled their legal disputes on Monday, December 10th, with the appeals court approving the lawsuit's dismissal the following day.

The details of the settlement have not been made public yet.

In February 2017, a federal jury in Texas found that Oculus was liable for $500m in damages to Zenimax due to copyright and trademark infringement.

Former Oculus boss Brendan Iribe was found liable for$150m, while founder Palmer Luckey was asked to pay $50m in damages.

In June, ZeniMax attempted to double the $500m damages, with the judge opting to half the figure instead. This was due to around $250m of the original figure being tied to "false designation of origin", i.e. lying about where the Oculus project began. A Texas federal judge found no evidence of this allegation, thus halved the $500m of damages to $250m.

The lawsuit began when ZeniMax found that John Carmack of Id Software had been working with Luckey on an early version of the Oculus VR headset. The company alleged that code that was its property was used in the process. 


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.