Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently been defending the company against allegations that Oculus / Facebook stole intellectual property from ZeniMax Media Inc, a game and content developer headquartered in Washington, DC. The law suit has already been going on for a week and includes allegations that John Carmack, who is now CTO at Oculus, stole IP from ZeniMax Media when he was working there. Zarmack worked for id software, which was acquired by ZeniMax Media.
While Facebook was not aware of these allegations during the acquisition, they deny any wrong doing by Oculus. During the trial it became clear that Facebook actually paid $3 billion for Oculus, which includes the $2 billion direct pay, $700 million to retain employees and $300 million as a payout for reaching milestones.
Looking back at the heyday of mobile phone / smartphone growth, we know that a product is hot when companies start fighting about IP in court. By that measure VR is definitely on the way up. – NH
