The court case brought against Facebook by Bethesda parent company ZeniMax came to a close yesterday, with a Texas jury awarding ZeniMax $500 million. Central to the case was the claim that former ZeniMax employee John Carmack stole code and a tool for working on virtual reality applications, and brought them over to his new job at Oculus VR.
Today Carmack took to Facebook to comment on the ruling, disputing the claims made by ZeniMax's expert witness on the matter of copyright infringement. The witness claimed Carmack "non-literally copied" code written while under the employ of ZeniMax, something Carmack says is "just not true."
"I am offended that a distinguished academic would say that his ad-hoc textual analysis makes him 'absolutely certain' of anything," Carmack wrote.
Non-literal copying describes a process in which the ideas behind a piece of code, it's structures and methodologies, are copied, but not directly. It's not simple copy-pasting, and is harder to prove in court, which is why an expert witness was brought in.
In his Facebook statement, Carmack spoke on the expert witness' analogy, in which the witness compared the Oculus code to a situation in which "someone wrote a book that was basically Harry Potter with the names changed." While Carmack agrees that would constitute infringement, he offers his own analogy: if someone "abstracts Harry Potter up a notch or two," the result could be "hundreds of other stories."
"These are not copyright infringement," he said. Carmack also had problems with the examples of abstraction given by the witness, saying in some cases the witness abstractions "were longer than the actual code."
Carmack noted he was unable to read the expert's full report, as the testimony is under seal. He believes the move was intentional, saying "if the code examples were released publicly, the internet would have viciously mocked the analysis."
After yesterday's ruling in ZeniMax versus Facebook case, ZeniMax issued a statement expressing its pleasure in the ruling, part of which was the determination that "Carmack intentionally destroyed data on his computer" after he received notification of the pending litigation.
Seth Macy is IGN's weekend web producer and just wants to be your friend. Follow him on Twitter @sethmacy, or subscribe to Seth Macy's YouTube channel.
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