In February, ZeniMax filed an injunction to request the worldwide blocking of sales of products that use Oculus software, which includes both Rift and Gear VR hardware, following a recent high-profile court case against Facebook/Oculus. According to a Bloomberg report, the hearing was held on Tuesday, where Oculus’ lawyers fought the ban, which has so far not seen a ruling.
Oculus’ lawyers argued that the injunction “would serve no one but ZeniMax, who would use it only as leverage to try to extract money from Oculus” and that it “would create a windfall for ZeniMax while detracting from the public’s enjoyment of Oculus’s groundbreaking products”.
They noted that ZeniMax’s requested re-write of the Oculus code base would be “lengthy, burdensome, and costly”, requiring the hiring of “clean-room engineers to make myriad changes not just to the code fragments ZeniMax presented at trial, but to numerous other segments of interrelated and interdependent code.”
ZeniMax, on the other hand, pushed the damage demand from $500 million to $1 billion. A summary of the hearings following the initial jury verdict is available (via subscription) at Law360.
According to Bloomberg, US District Judge Ed Kinkeade encouraged lawyers representing both sides to reach a settlement, and the hearing ended without a ruling. Our detailed breakdown on the ZeniMax vs Oculus lawsuit explains why the complexities of technology copyright infringement cases can drag on indefinitely.
