Jury awards ZeniMax half a billion dollars in Oculus trial

Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus has been ordered to pay $500 million in damages to video game publisher ZeniMax Media for failing to comply with a non-disclosure agreement. However, the jury also found Wednesday that Oculus didn’t violate any trade secrets.

After the $500 million award was revealed, ZeniMax said that it could seek an injunction to temporarily halt sales for the Oculus Rift.

Earlier, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had testified in court that he was not aware of the intellectual property claims between Oculus and ZeniMax.

Oculus said it will appeal, but that it looks forward to eventually putting the case behind it.

Luckey was reportedly ordered to pay $50 million in the suit, with former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe on the hook for $150 million.

Today, according to Polygon, a Texas jury awarded Zenimax the half billion after deciding that Luckey had in fact broken his NDA.

Though the jury ruled that none of the defendants misappropriated ZeniMax’s trade secrets, it found Oculus’ use of computer code directly infringed on ZeniMax’s copyright.

ZeniMax claimed Palmer Lucky could not have created the Oculus Rift without Carmack’s help, saying he created a barely functioning prototype that Carmack greatly refined.

The lawsuit between ZeniMax and the Oculus Rift team has come to a somewhat conclusive end. It’s a major loss for the Facebook-owned company, although things could’ve gone much worse.

During the hearing, the court heard how talks between ZeniMax and Oculus broke down when ZeniMax demanded a 15 percent equity interest in Oculus.

ZeniMax’s case against Oculus dates back to 2014, when the company first publicly accused Oculus of illegally using code and technology that Carmack developed while at Id Software, before he joined Oculus as CTO in 2013.

Oculus in its statement focused on being found not guilty of trade secret theft, and said it plans to appeal the decision. This accusation occurred about a month after Facebook announced that they were acquiring Oculus for $2 billion Dollars.