text: Image copyright Getty Images 
   
   A US court has awarded $500m (£395m) to a firm which sued Facebook and other defendants over the use of its virtual reality technology. 
   
   The jury found Oculus, which Facebook bought in 2014, had breached a contract with video game developer Zenimax when launching its own VR headset. 
   
   Oculus said it was "disappointed" and would appeal against the ruling. 
   
   The case threatened to overshadow Facebook's latest results, which showed it enjoyed a strong end to the year. 
   
   Facebook's net profit more than doubled to $3.6bn in the fourth quarter. 
   
   The social network was helped by 53% growth in advertising revenues, and said it was on course to hit two billion users in the first half of 2017. 
   
   'Trade secrets' 
   
   Shortly before the results came out, the court awarded Zenimax damages from Facebook, Oculus and Oculus executives following a three-week trial. 
   
   Zenimax had argued that its early innovations in virtual reality were unlawfully copied when Oculus built its own headset, the Rift. 
   
   An Oculus spokesperson said the jury rejected this argument, but did find that Oculus breached a contract with Zenimax and infringed some of its copyright. 
   
   "The heart of this case was about whether Oculus stole Zenimax's trade secrets, and the jury found decisively in our favour," the Oculus spokesperson said. 
   
   The firm did not comment on the $500m damages. 
   
   Copyright infringement 
   
   Zenimax chief executive Robert Altman said: "We are pleased that the jury in our case in the US District Court in Dallas has awarded Zenimax $500m for defendants' unlawful infringement of our copyrights and trademarks." 
   
   The co-founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, was found to have broken a non-disclosure agreement with the firm. 
   
   Analysis 
   
   Image copyright Getty Images 
   
   By Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter 
   
   Few people will have given Mark Zuckerberg as many headaches as Palmer Luckey. 
   
   The 24-year-old founded Oculus VR, and when Facebook stepped in to buy the firm for $2bn, he was rewarded very handsomely indeed. Then it went a bit downhill. 
   
   First, it was revealed he was using some of that money to fund a pro-Donald Trump trolling campaign, which led to Facebook removing him from public view. He didn't even turn up to his own company's developer's conference last year. 
   
   And now, a jury has ruled that he broke a non-disclosure agreement that'll mean $500m in damages (unless Facebook wins on appeal). 
   
   Mark Zuckerberg doesn't display many emotions - but you wonder what he'll be like behind closed doors on this one. 
   
   As it stands, Palmer Luckey is still a Facebook employee, but what he's doing there is anyone's guess - the company won't even tell me his job title. 
   
   Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified last month that "the idea that Oculus products are based on someone else's technology is just wrong". 
   
   Zenimax, which owns id Software, a video games developer, was suing Facebook for $2bn. 
   
   Along with the claims against Palmer Luckey, it alleged that John Carmack, co-founder of id, took intellectual property belonging to Zenimax when he left the firm to join Oculus as its full-time chief technology officer. 
   
   'Stellar quarter' 
   
   Virtual reality is only a small part of Facebook's current business, but is seen as important to the firm's strategy over the next 10 years. 
   
   Most of Facebook's fourth-quarter revenue - which jumped 54% to $27.6bn - came from adverts on its social network. 
   
   "Facebook had another stellar quarter, delivering record revenue, user growth and profitability, as it rides the shift of advertising to online," said Martin Garner, a senior analyst at CCS Insight. 
   
   "However it expects advertising growth to slow in 2017, so it expects to be less profitable this year." 
   
   Fake news 
   
   Other challenges that Facebook face this year include a changing approach to privacy in Europe, an uncertain business landscape in the US and challenges in China, Mr Garner said. 
   
   The social network has also been widely criticised after some users complained that fake news on its platform had influenced the US presidential election. 
   
   In a call with analysts on Wednesday, Facebook executives signalled it would tackle the problem through the use of more artificial intelligence. 
   
   They also said many of Facebook's new users were in India, where telecoms operators had offered free data packages for Facebook traffic. 
   
   For the full year, Facebook grew its net profit by 177% to $10.2bn. ||||| (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) cruised past Wall Street’s earnings and revenue expectations on Wednesday with strong growth in its mobile ad business, demonstrating that controversy over so-called “fake news” and inaccurate advertising measurements had little impact on its financial performance. 
   
   With quarterly profit of $3.57 billion, more than double the $1.56 billion it reported a year ago, the company showed no signs of slowdown in growth. The results handily beat analysts’ expectations, and shares ticked up about 0.2 percent in after-hours trading. 
   
   The company had warned in November that ad growth would likely slow “meaningfully” due to limits on ad load - the total number of ads Facebook can show to each user. But there was little sign of that in the fourth quarter as total revenue soared to $8.81 billion from $5.84 billion a year ago. 
   
   “I think the rate of growth will decline, but it will remain very high,” said analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities. “They grew 57 percent in 2016, and our current model has ‘only’ 38 percent revenue growth in 2017. That’s still pretty impressive.” 
   
   Facebook suffered a slight setback just before the market close when a jury in Texas ordered Facebook, its virtual reality unit Oculus, and other defendants to pay a combined $500 million to ZeniMax Media Inc, a video game publisher, for violating a non-disclosure agreement. [nL1N1FM20U] 
   
   But the company’s core business continued to power ahead as mobile advertising accelerated; it now accounts for 84 percent of ad revenue, up from 80 percent a year ago. 
   
   Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on a call on Wednesday that the company expects a major ramp-up in hiring and other spending during 2017 as it invests in video and other priorities. 
   
   Zuckerberg said the focus would be on generating short-form, original videos, especially professionally created “episodic content” produced week-to-week. 
   
   Users should come to Facebook “when they want to keep up-to-date on what’s going on with their favorite show or what’s going on with a public figure,” he said. 
   
   U.S. President Donald Trump used the service for that on Tuesday, when he broadcast his announcement of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch on Facebook Live. 
   
   THREAT TO NETFLIX 
   
   The video push could ultimately pose a threat not only to YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google, but also to next-generation television companies like Netflix Inc (NFLX.O). 
   
   The Facebook logo is displayed on their website in an illustration photo taken in Bordeaux, France, February 1, 2017. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau 
   
   Facebook’s strong performance could also throw a shadow on the expected Snap Inc initial public offering. Facebook competes with Snap chiefly through its Messenger service, and also with WhatsApp and Instagram. 
   
   The various Facebook apps have all been adding features rapidly to attract more users and retain those already on the network, and some of those features are clearly aimed at Snap. 
   
   Facebook has also been building new tools to stem the spread of fake news and partisan propaganda on the network, which emerged as a major issue in last year’s U.S. presidential election. 
   
   Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg played down the impact of U.S. election spending on the company’s finances. She compared it to the soccer World Cup or the Super Bowl and said it was not a “top 10 vertical” for the fourth quarter. 
   
   “No one event is that big for our business,” she said. 
   
   USERS GROWING 
   
   The company inched closer to reaching 2 billion users, saying that about 1.86 billion people were using its service monthly as of Dec. 31, up 17 percent from a year earlier. 
   
   China apparently will not contribute to that growth any time soon, as Zuckerberg all but ruled out an imminent expansion in the world’s most populous country. 
   
   “We’re only going to do this in a way that we’re comfortable with in the long term,” he told analysts, adding that there would be “no news at all in the near term.” 
   
   Mobile daily active users rose 23 percent to 1.15 billion, the company said. More than 90 percent of Facebook’s users access the network through mobile devices. 
   
   Facebook is expected to generate about $29.71 billion in mobile ad revenue in 2017, according to research firm eMarketer, up about 35.2 percent from 2016. 
   
   Net income attributable to Facebook shareholders for the quarter rose to $3.56 billion, or $1.21 per share, from $1.56 billion, or 54 cents per share, a year earlier. 
   
   A Facebook logo is displayed on the side of a tour bus in New York's financial district July 28, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo 
   
   Excluding items, the company earned $1.41 per share. 
   
   Analysts on average had expected a profit of $1.31 per share on revenue of $8.51 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
target: – Facebook is going to have to cough up $500 million in real money for unlawfully using another company's virtual reality technology. A jury decided Wednesday that VR pioneer Oculus, which Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014, infringed copyright and trademarks when it used code from games maker Zenimax to launch its own VR headset, the BBC reports. Zenimax had accused the company of stealing trade secrets, saying Oculus headsets were "primitive" before a former Zenimax employee used his insider knowledge to improve them. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells CNBC that the company is "disappointed in certain elements of" the ruling, but Facebook notes that while the jury found the company guilty of copyright infringement, failure to comply with a non-disclosure agreement, and misuse of Oculus trademarks, it did not find it guilty of stealing secrets. She says the $500 million verdict, which Facebook is considering appealing, is "not material to our financials." Reuters reports that Facebook released its latest financial results Wednesday, showing a $3.57 billion profit in the last quarter, up $2 billion year-over-year.