
Founder of Facebook's Oculus hit with lawsuit - phodo
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/22/us-facebook-oculus-lawsuit-idUSKBN0O72AC20150522
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giarc
At least he can go to his new owner for personal advice about these type of
situations...

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kzhahou
Drop the "Rift". Just "Oculus." It's cleaner.

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silverlight
Not a whole lot of actual evidence to judge by yet. Will all depend on the
supposed contract they claim Lucky signed, and how similar the prototype he
built for them is to what was showed during the Kickstarter campaign. Amusing
the parallels here between Lucky and Zuckerberg.

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staunch
Their claims are weak and old. The corporate version of long lost friends
asking you for money after they see you on TV.

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thewhizkid
Not speculating, but always found the public story about the beginnings of OR
to be somewhat, uh, magical, given his non-technical background.

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cma
"Nontechnical background":

>To fund these projects, he earned at least US$36,000 by fixing and reselling
damaged iPhones,[2] and was also a sailing coach and did boat repair.[6]

>In 2009, he founded ModRetro Forums, a website for discussing modifications
to old hardware devices such as game consoles and PCs.[3]

>During his study at California State, he worked as an engineer at the Mixed
Reality Lab (MxR)[12] at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the
University of Southern California as part of a design team for cost-effective
virtual reality.[2][3]

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dopamean
I've noticed people recently referring to non-programmers as non-technical.
It's a weird thing.

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tedunangst
Doesn't know Haskell? Non-technical.

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josephpmay
Lucky may be saved by the fact that a lot of the technology in the original
Rift prototypes was developed by USC's ICT which was fine letting him use it.
I wonder what the exact technology is that TRT is alleging Lucky stole.

Things like this make me really hesitant to intern at a company in the
industry I want to go into. If I ever start my own company in that industry
(which I plan to do), I will definitely be using a certain percentage of the
same technology as any other player is. Even if I knew about the technology
before working there, I would still technically be violating a NDA.

This reminds me of George Harrison's "Subconscious Plagiarism" lawsuit.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infring...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit)

~~~
leoc
> Lucky may be saved by the fact that a lot of the technology in the original
> Rift prototypes was developed by USC's ICT which was fine letting him use
> it.

That doesn't seem to be the case:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/23rh0m/ken_perlin_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/23rh0m/ken_perlin_on_oculus_shouldnt_mark_bolas_who_led/)
Luckey was certainly aware of the Wide5 HMD from USC
[http://www.fakespacelabs.com/Wide5.html](http://www.fakespacelabs.com/Wide5.html)
[http://people.ict.usc.edu/~suma/papers/olson-
vr2011poster.pd...](http://people.ict.usc.edu/~suma/papers/olson-
vr2011poster.pdf) fairly early in his VR work (see
[http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=13741](http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=13741)
and
[http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=13158&star...](http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=13158&start=0)
) but the Wide5 apparently has different lenses, doesn't use PC-side software
distortion correction and uses two screens (the consumer Rift will too, but
all Rift versions up to and including Dev Kit 2
[https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?t=7544](https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?t=7544)
are single-screen).

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josephpmay
Interesting. I seem to remember Mark painting a different picture when I spoke
to him, but this was over a year ago and my memory may be deceiving me. It
seems like they came up with similar ideas at the same time, which happens all
the time in tech.

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wisienkas
All these lawsuits in IT are seriously getting ridiculous. Some times they are
right, sometimes they are not. But really why all this confidential and
agreement.

If you work just 1 place they can accuse that you use knowledge from there in
your new job.

Life is hard, Don't attack personal people, just live harder.

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moron4hire
I had a very similar issue when I was 20 years old. I was an instructor for a
martial arts school in my home town. They decided, all of a sudden, that
having the most students they ever had meant they were in "hard times" and
without notice just stopped paying the instructors. There were a lot of
stories about "loyalty" leading up to this. And then, when I quit because I
literally could not afford the gas money to show up anymore if I was spending
my time there instead of at another job, they sent me a cease-and-desist
letter to preemptively warn me against trying to open my own school with their
"proprietary information", aka the routine of basic calisthenics, striking and
kicking techniques, and other common martial arts training regimes that every
other school was doing. Never mind that all I wanted to do was finish my CS
degree and had no desire to open a school. Never mind that you can't send a
cease-and-desist unless a person has actually done something. They read
somewhere they should do this and they did it.

To defend against this sort of stuff, you have to be extremely well-versed in
your field. You have to know exactly which parts are public knowledge and
which parts aren't (and therefore, are proprietary knowledge). You have to
know all the dark, secret corners of your field. You have to not only be an
expert, you have to be THE expert, the one and only, the master of all
knowledge.

Because the court won't be. And they don't care. It's your word against your
former employer's about what you learned there versus what you knew before
versus what is common industry knowledge. I've also worked at a ton of CRUD-y
consulting firms that had similar language in their NDAs. I'm sorry, nobody
building an OLTP system for keeping track of sales figures on ASP.NET and SQL
Server is blazing new trails. Not that there isn't anything new to do in that
field, just that cross section of the programmers who are capable of doing it
and the managers who are willing to go out on a limb, don't exist in that
market segment.

Just another reason to stay freelance. Just another reason to refuse to sign
NDAs, at least unedited by my own lawyer.

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bhouston
This is a problematic situation for Luckey. It really depends on the contract
he signed for TRT and what type of feedback he was getting. It appeared that
he was technically under TRT contract during the time he developed the
Kickstarter campaign - early 2012.

It is one thing to quit a position with a company and then create a competing
product -- that happens all the time -- but it is a lot different to be
contracted by a company to develop a product while at the same time clearly
developing a competing product to the company you are contracting with --
getting the IP straight can be very problematic, and it does seem like a clear
conflict of interest.

I would never recommend doing something like that.

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moron4hire
Does anyone have a link to the complaint? I'd like to see more details.

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wglb
[http://ia601507.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.cand.287...](http://ia601507.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.cand.287721/gov.uscourts.cand.287721.1.0.pdf)

~~~
bhouston
Reading that is pretty damning if and only if the prototype that Luckey
developed for TRT was very similar to the Oculus Rift prototype. That isn't
made clear in the filing.

But the general circumstances are pretty suspicious.

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Mikeb85
If he took actual materials, they may have a case. Otherwise, sounds baseless.
You can't own someone's career experience.

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bhouston
A company can own someones inventions that were developed during the course of
a contract or employment is the agreement is done in such a way to assign
them. It isn't automatic, but it is a real thing and can lead to legal
trouble:

[http://www.marsdd.com/mars-library/intellectual-property-
pro...](http://www.marsdd.com/mars-library/intellectual-property-protection-
for-employers/)

EDIT: Accord to the actual complaint Luckey signed a confidentiality +
exclusivity agreement regarding the TRT stuff that has a term of five years:
"On August 1, 2011, Luckey executed a written 'Nondisclosure, exclusivity and
payments agreement' contract with Seidl on behalf of the Partnership. Two
witnesses also executed the agreement on behalf of Luckey at Luckey’s
direction: Tom Allan and Jeff Bacon."

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interdrift
That's because they are hungry for money. He built this and he deserves all
that he got.

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littletimmy
How on earth do you know that? Are you an Oculus insider?

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staunch
We know Palmer Luckey created Oculus and that his work attracted John Carmack,
which led to the VR revolution that exists today. They may have some legal
standing even if they have no ethical standing.

