14 DAY TRIAL // Shortly after Oculus confirmed that they would be releasing a consumer version in the first quarter of 2016, news came out that a Hawaiian company known as Total Recall Technologies sued the Facebook-owned virtual set over use of confidential information.
According to the WSJ, the founder of Oculus VR, the company that Facebook bought a year back, is accused of having misappropriated the guidance and recommendations that he had received from the Hawaii-based company for the improvement of the virtual set, which was merely a prototype at the time.
Furthermore, the company purports that Luckey Palmer was, in fact, hired by them to work on the head-mounted set, but once he gathered all the information he needed, he breached the contract and started a fund-raising campaign to build the product that he claims to be entirely his contrivance.
The accuser demands financial compensation
If the claims turn out to be true, this could be a huge blow for Mark Zuckerberg's recently acquired company, as although the California newspaper that first reported the case did not disclose the amount of money that the founder is sued for, it did mention that Total Recall Technologieswas seeking damages for several complaints like illegal acquirement of confidential information and contract infringement.
However, this is not the first legal proceeding filed against Oculus VR. The company that Facebook bought for $2 billion (€1.81 billion) sued Oculus shortly after the acquisition, claiming ownership of the technology used by the founder in developing the product.
Since not much information has been revealed so far, it is yet unclear whether the Facebook-owned company might be dealing with another attempt to cash in on the virtual set that seems to be in high demand.
Besides, the timing of the two lawsuits is rather suspicions, the first one was just a month after the Facebook purchase took place, while the latter just a few days after the announcement of an upcoming consumer version.
What’s more, these kinds of lawsuits seem to have become common practice in Silicon Valley, given that Facebook’s CEO himself is currently under the accusation of idea theft.