
Oculus accused of destroying evidence, Zuckerberg to testify in VR theft trial - type0
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/oculus-accused-of-destroying-evidence-zuckerberg-to-testify-in-vr-theft-trial/
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bkraz
It fits a pattern. I was a hardware engineer at Valve during the early VR
days, working mostly on Lighthouse and the internal dev headset. There were a
few employees who insisted that the Valve VR group give away both hardware and
software to Oculus with the hope that they would work together with Valve on
VR. The tech was literally given away -- no contract, no license. After the
facebook acquisition, these folks presumably received large financial
incentives to join facebook, which they did. It was the most questionable
thing I've seen in my whole career, and was partially caused by Valve's flat
management structure and general lack of oversight. I left shortly after.

~~~
blazespin
You left because Valve made a good faith gamble in hopes of accelerating the
development of VR with no guarantee of return?

Was Valve not growing fast enough for you?

That being said, yes, I agree that FB has been a tad arrogant with oculus.
And, if you look at sales, karma is catching up to them.

~~~
bkraz
Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all
of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the
difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally
successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots
of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is
just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other
choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still
doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our
investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years
of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that
company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees
strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario.

Growth at Valve is a little funny. It's like an oil-rich nation. Gaining more
citizens is not really desirable since the wealth will just get spread more
thinly, and there is no way that new employees will be able to make more money
than Steam already does with a very limited number of employees. I know the
company is trying new things, and making honest investments in new areas, but
it's hard to shake the bottom line.

~~~
dleslie
Sounds like Valve lacks direction.

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devwastaken
If you look at how Amazon has been buying up Twitch.tv, Curse, and now are
experimenting with having a Twitch game downloader, you see how far behind
Steam is with the times.

Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do
whatever he wants with the company. I think he's really taken a retired seat.
Steam's social platform is lacking, the technology behind it all is old (Just
look a the steam API), and they aren't investing into anything. Even customer
support is majorly lacking. The second Amazon starts selling games, its game
over. They can advertise their client and services through twitch, and connect
games and players back to twitch and the Curse client. Thats the triangle of
doom to competitors, where you control the product, the platform and the
community. They have it all in the bag, and it was so blindingly obvious.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>Even customer support is majorly lacking.

I have probably refunded 10 games in the past year or so for various reasons.
I've gotten sales and deals unimaginable before the days of steam. I can't
imagine any other company letting me get away with such things. Arguably, we
have the EU to thank for that, but Valve has zero obligation to allow this
policy for US customers like me, but did so anyway.

> I think he's really taken a retired seat.

From my reading of recent VR history, he's fairly hands on with it. I did read
an interview where he claims he purposely puts himself in the backseat because
he didn't want to become "King of Valve" where his personal taste and ideas
trump everyone else's. He something of the anti-Jobs.

>Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do
whatever he wants with the company.

Privately held companies have different pros and cons than publicly held ones.
I can't imagine Valve being a better company as a public entity. Think of all
the investor-minded decisions (must hit certain milestones, projections, etc)
that have doomed gaming companies in the past. Valve is largely immune to
that, but as you say, comes with the price of being fairly slow moving
compared to their peers.

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dleslie
> While Carmack admitted to copying thousands of e-mails to a personal hard
> drive on his last day working for ZeniMax, he testified that he didn't use
> this code while at Oculus. Instead, Carmack says he rewrote the technology
> used in the Rift and Gear VR headsets from scratch and that the code he had
> written at ZeniMax wouldn't even work in the current Oculus headsets.

...

I don't think that excuse holds much water; leaving your employer with their
code is often theft on its own right, but to then implement it again while
plausibly using the stolen code as a reference? Oof.

~~~
Hydraulix989
I don't think you understand intellectual property law.

> "leaving your employer with their code"

From how I understood it, he didn't necessarily copy the code to his personal
hard drive, only the emails.

> "he rewrote the technology ... from scratch"

It's a lot tougher to argue that there is a misappropriation of IP if it's a
clean room implementation. Code IS the intellectual property here (often, this
is even explicitly stated in the standard PIIA agreement).

Now, Zenimax's only recourse is possible trade secret misappropriation, which
is much harder to establish in court, given the lack of tangible evidence in
the form of copied code.

That said, the State of California is particularly protective of workers'
rights in this latter scenario, non-compete agreements are actually banned
here.

~~~
dleslie
From the article:

> he testified that he didn't use this code

I read that as implying that the emails included code. As a developer, my
emails have included code; and it's not so surprising that his emails would
have included code when he was working with an external party.

> if it's a clean room implementation

It cannot be a clean room implementation if the same individual is involved in
the creation of both instances.

~~~
Hydraulix989
No. Emails are considered correspondence, not IP: [https://www.quora.com/Is-
an-email-message-considered-intelle...](https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-
message-considered-intellectual-property)

As for clean room implementations, that is true, except in California.

Here, it does not really hold in court at all:

You can leave one company to join another doing more or less the same thing
(because non-competition clauses are banned here), as long as you do not copy
the code itself.

It sounds like you and your uncle post are both programmers trying to look at
things too much from a logically moral perspective, rather than actually how
the courts view these things, since you aren't very familiar with the latter.

~~~
jpab
I don't think California is the relevant jurisdiction here.

The quote from ZeniMax in the article is "With the start of the trial of our
case in Federal District Court in Dallas [...]"

Carmack lives and works in Texas. In fact I think (though I don't have a
citation for it) Carmack's choice to stay in Texas is the reason Oculus has a
Dallas office. Of course Oculus and Facebook headquarters are in California.
ZeniMax headquarters (according to Wikipedia) are in Maryland.

~~~
Hydraulix989
The parties always strive to get the most favorable jurisdiction for their
cases.

That is why Samsung built an ice skating rink in front of the U.S. District
Court for the Eastern District of Texas -- to lobby the judges who heavily
favor patent holders -- literally thousands of patent infringement suits are
filed in this particular court because of this.

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alphonsegaston
Oculus has had an ironically Gibsonian beginning for a VR company. Covert
funding of politically-motivated cyber gangs, tech leads caught up in
undercover sex crime stings, possible theft of cutting edge tech. I guess
fiction is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

~~~
josh2600
"Beginning" is a weird choice of words. I'm pretty sure palmer funding
/thedonald is last year, and Katz's sting was in like December.

Anything post-acquisition is not really the beginning anymore methinks. I
don't disagree with your assertion that it is a ridiculous series of
unfortunate events.

~~~
alphonsegaston
I was speaking more in terms of its commercial introduction/becoming
mainstream, but point taken.

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russtrotter
I've always held Carmack in very high regard. He's one of the few folks in our
field where if he says he didn't my gut tells me to believe him. Here's to
justice being served, one way or another. There's a great comment from a user
"Netherhigal" on the comments for the article that says: "If it were anyone
else saying they rewrote the code from scratch, I'd call bullshit. With
Carmack though? I'd believe he sneezed onto the keyboard and functioning code
happened."

Pretty much sums up my opinion as well :)

~~~
Hydraulix989
Carmack is a great person, one of my coding idols.

An interesting piece of history is that it was confirmed in the biography
Masters of Doom that he started iD software with Romero using company hardware
while he was employed by Softdisk, and they had to come to an agreement to
continue developing software for them (including Keen games) for a bit after
they left in order to appease Softdisk into not suing them into oblivion.

Apparently, old habits die hard.

~~~
sgdread
You must count the fact that computers these days were luxury and one simply
cannot afford one like we do nowadays.

~~~
Hydraulix989
If anything, it makes the case that much more egregious -- there's a
difference between borrowing your employer's pen and borrowing expensive high-
end lab equipment to start your own competitive enterprise.

~~~
Zaonce
And yet Ken Levine had no issues doing that with Looking Glass offices and
equipment.

~~~
Hydraulix989
What is your point?

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hartator
Lost a lot of respect for them when they received so much funding and support
to end up kick out by the HTC vive with a better headset, controls and no DRM
bs.

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joeevans1000
VR by Facebook is like adventure travel trips organized by WalMart.

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dkarapetyan
This is a bit too much gossip and not enough anything substantial.

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Hydraulix989
As they say, any time there's money on the table, people suddenly come back
out of the woodwork and start knocking...

~~~
Hydraulix989
Given that people are downvoting this, it's interesting that an article just
got released confirming that Zuckerberg more or less said the exact same thing
I did, from NYT today:

"It is pretty common when you announce a big deal or do something that all
kinds of people just kind of come out of the woodwork and claim that they just
own some portion of the deal," Zuckerberg said.

