John Carmack denies claims that he tried to “hide or wipe” evidence in recent Oculus lawsuit

John Carmack denies claims that he tried to

John Carmack denies claims that he tried to “hide or wipe” evidence

 
In a recent court ruling, ZeniMax was awarded $500 million from Oculus, with Oculus’ co-founder Palmer Luckey being found to have violated this Non-disclosure agreement with the company. 
 
In this court case, former iD Software lead programmer and founder, John Carmack was also found to have destroyed evidence that proved that Oculus had used code from ZeniMax, stealing over 10,000 documents from ZeniMax when he left iD software (who are owned by ZeniMax). 
 
John Carmack has since denied that he tried to destroy evidence which could be used against him and Oculus, writing a lengthy post to defend his actions and express frustration at the “experts” who testified on behalf of ZeniMax. 

 

The Zenimax vs Oculus trial is over. I disagreed with their characterization, misdirection, and selective omissions. I never tried to hide or wipe any evidence, and all of my data is accounted for, contrary to some stories being spread.

Being sued sucks. For the most part, the process went as I expected.

 
One thing to note is that unlike Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe, John Carmack was not asked to pay any of the $500 million settlement, though the court case does paint the developer in a very negative light. 
 
After Carmack’s public denial of his wrongdoing, ZeniMax issued the following statement. ZeniMax says that a court-appointed expert found that Carmack wiped 92% of his hard drive after receiving notice of the lawsuit, a point that the company calls a “hard fact”.  
 
 

 In addition to expert testimony finding both literal and non-literal copying, Oculus programmers themselves admitted using Zenimax’s copyrighted code (one saying he cut and pasted it into the Oculus SDK), and [Oculus VR co-founder] Brendan Iribe, in writing, requested a license for the ‘source code shared by Carmack’ they needed for the Oculus Rift. Not surprisingly, the jury found Zenimax code copyrights were infringed. The Oculus Rift was built on a foundation of Zenimax technology.

As for the denial of wiping, the Court’s independent expert found 92 percent of Carmack’s hard drive was wiped—all data was permanently destroyed, right after Carmack got notice of the lawsuit, and that his affidavit denying the wiping was false. Those are the hard facts.

  

John Carmack denies claims that he tried to   

This court case is a major hit to John Carmack’s reputation, with legal documents not only stating that he destroyed evidence that would have been relevant to the case but that he also stole over 10,000 documents from a previous employer and used them to further their rivals. 

 

 You can join the discussion on John Carmack denying accusations of “destroying evidence” on the OC3D Forums. 

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