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Judge halves ZeniMax's $500M Oculus payout, declines to block Rift sales

After an updated ruling yesterday, Facebook will now only owe ZeniMax Media Inc. half of the $500 million initially granted for allegedly using stolen code to build the Oculus Rift.

Game Developer, Staff

June 28, 2018

1 Min Read
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After an updated ruling yesterday, Facebook will now only owe ZeniMax Media Inc. half of the $500 million initially granted for allegedly using stolen code to build the Oculus Rift

As reported by Bloomberg, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade also rejected Zenimax's request that he ban sales of Oculus headsets after Oculus argued that the ban would place strain on the company, especially if ZeniMax has no rival product that is suffering because of the Rift's availability.

The lawsuit was first filed by ZeniMax back in May 2014 after the company claimed Id Software co-founder John Carmack and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey stole copyrighted code and research to reverse engineer what would eventually become the Rift headset. 

The original $500 million ZeniMax was originally granted was reduced by Kinkeade after Oculus claimed that the copyright infringement wasn't "substantial" enough to warrant the original amount, claiming that only seven lines of Oculus code had been copied from ZeniMax "out of approximately 42 billion lines." 

Kinkeade awarded Zenimax with $200 million for breach of contract and $50 million for copyright infringement, but removed the other $250 million awarded by jurors including damages against Oculus co-founders Brendan Iribe and Palmer Luckey.

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