Big trade-secret news last week. Oculus VR, Inc., the virtual-reality company Facebook is acquiring for $2 billion. was sued by Zenimax Media Inc. for trade-secrets misappropriation. Zenimax owns popular video-game titles such as Doom and Wolfenstein. A copy of the complaint is linked below.
Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus received widespread media coverage. This lawsuit, which will likely seek billions in damages, should draw extensive media interest.
According to the complaint, when Oculus’s founder (Palmer Luckey, named as a defendant) was developing Oculus’s VR headset called “Rift,” Zenimax provided Luckey with Zenimax’s proprietary information. This information allowed Oculus to transform Rift from a primitive, non-functional prototype into a viable platform justifying Facebook’s billions. After that, the Zenimax employees involved left to work for Oculus.
There are always two sides to every story, and so far we’ve only heard from Zenimax. But the complaint paints a pretty egregious picture of trade-secret theft. One example: After leaving Zenimax, where he had signed an agreement providing that any intellectual property he created for Zenimax belonged to Zenimax, to join Oculus, John Carmack tweeted: “When you are in a hurry, and you know you wrote the exact needed code (well!) at a previous job, reimplementation grates.”
While Zenimax appears to have a strong case, I see some potential issues. Most importantly, Zenimax did not have Oculus sign a nondisclosure agreement until after Zenimax had provided Oculus with at least some of its proprietary information. Oculus will likely argue that Zenimax did not reasonably protect this information, since it shared it with a third-party without requiring a confidentiality agreement.
This leads to the biggest takeaway thus far for companies looking to protect their proprietary information: Never share this information with anyone, for any purpose, unless that person/entity executes a nondisclosure agreement.
It’s also interesting that a company as sophisticated as Zenimax would allow its employees to provide significant proprietary information to a third party without first working out, and documenting, how it would be compensated. Later on, the two companies tried to negotiate a compensation agreement, to no avail.
Finally, any company that doubts the risks employees present to its proprietary information should look at the responses to the Carmack tweet I discussed above, which has 95 “favorites.” Sample response: “that’s what USB sticks are for…”
I will monitor this case and write about its developments.