A judge has denied Facebook’s attempt to have a lawsuit over the Oculus Rift thrown out. ZeniMax sued Facebook, claiming trade secrets were used in the development of the Oculus Rift.
Oculus is the company that produces the Rift. The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset that’s scheduled to be released in 2016. Facebook, looking to participate in the rapidly growing popularity of virtual reality, scooped up Oculus in 2014 for about $2 billion.
ZeniMax is the parent company of a few different game developers. Bethesda and id Software are ZeniMax studios. Bethesda is known for the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. id Software is known for the iconic game Doom.
Oculus got a huge bump in popularity when John Carmack took a job with them. Carmack is the co-creator of Doom and co-founder of id. A number of other employees jumped ship and went to Oculus. And that’s when things got problematic, according to ZeniMax.
ZeniMax believes their former employees used trade secrets in developing the technology behind the Oculus Rift. They claim that years of expensive research and copyrighted code were essentially stolen. Oculus disagreed.
After that, ZeniMax took the issue to court. The lawsuit has multiple defendents: Facebook, Oculus VR, and Palmer Luckey (a former employee of ZeniMax). Luckey argued that his non-disclosure agreement with ZeniMax wasn’t valid because of some non-specific verbiage. He also argued that he wasn’t compensated for keeping things secret. Oculus argued that ZeniMax wasn’t taking necessary steps to protect their trade secrets.
The judge has thrown out all of the defendants’ claims. This allows the case to move to the discovery procedure, which is scheduled to take place in February 2016.