Feb 1 (Reuters) - A U.S. jury in Texas on Wednesday ordered Facebook Inc., its virtual reality unit Oculus, and other defendants to pay a combined $500 million to ZeniMax Media Inc., a video game publisher that says Oculus stole its technology. The Dallas court order comes weeks after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the allegations of stealing the ZeniMax technology and said that it used its own technology to create the Oculus VR headset. Though the jury ruled that none of the defendants misappropriated ZeniMax’s trade secrets, it found Oculus’ use of computer code directly infringed on ZeniMax’s copyright. The lawsuit, filed in May 2014, alleges that former id Software co-founder John Carmack stole the firm's intellectual property when he left the company to become Oculus' chief technology officer in 2013. Oculus, the virtual reality headset company Facebook bought in 2014 for $2bn, was found by a US court to have used technology developed by ZeniMax, an American video game company, after a trial in which Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and Oculus creator Palmer Luckey both testified. “The heart of this case was about whether Oculus stole ZeniMax’s trade secrets, and the jury found decisively in our favor,” an Oculus spokeswoman said in a statement.
A jury finds in favor of video game publisher ZeniMax Media after the trial of its copyright lawsuit against Oculus and Facebook, regarding virtual reality coding.