A US court has ordered Facebook's virtual reality subsidiary Oculus and its executives to pay game developer ZeniMax Media $500 million in damages over copyright infringement and violation of non-disclosure agreement.The Dallas court order comes weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the allegations of stealing the ZeniMax technology and said that it used its own technology to create the Oculus VR headset.
Facebook bought Oculus VR for more than $2 billion in 2014 and the dispute started just after the acquisition when ZeniMax Media sued Oculus of stealing important elements of its technology.
According to a report in Variety on Thursday, ZeniMax was seeking as much as $4 billion in the case. However, the jury threw out some claims, and primarily focused on the fact that Oculus executives violated their non-disclosure agreements.
ZeniMax was quoted as saying that it was pleased with the verdict, but left the door open for additional legal proceedings. "We will consider what further steps we need to take to ensure there will be no ongoing use of our misappropriated technology," it said.
ZeniMax will seek an injunction to restrain Oculus and Facebook from their ongoing use of computer code that the jury found an infringment of its copyrights.
In an email, Oculus said: "We're obviously disappointed by a few other aspects of today's verdict, but we are undeterred." Facebook though has not responded so far to the court verdict.
Despite this feud, Facebook may invest more than $3 billion in the next decade to reach its goal of providing hundreds of millions of people with a good virtual reality experience.
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