Tough breakups aren't easy by definition, and the breakup between legendary programmer John Carmack and former employer ZeniMax has probably been one of the most worded of all. Now, Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack has filed a lawsuit against ZeniMax for $22.5 million, money he claims ZeniMax still owes him from id Softwares' $150 million sale to ZeniMax back in 2009. Carmack says the amount he is filling for is part of the $45 million owed to him for the sale, of which he has already been able to convert 22.5 million (the non-missing half) in ZeniMax shares. However, Carmack says ZeniMax is unlawfully withholding the remaining $22.5 million because of "sour grapes".

Carmack claims ZeniMax is holding back the payment as payback for "a series of allegations regarding claimed violations of Mr. Carmack's Employment Agreement", referencing the Zenimax/Facebook lawsuit over the supposed theft of trade secrets. However, Oculus was recently found not guilty of stealing trade secrets, though the court ordered the company to pay $500 million for copyright infringement, false designation and the violation of Palmer Luckey's NDA. Oculus is appealing the case, calling the prior ruling "legally flawed and factually unwarranted."

Earlier this month, Zenimax was awarded $500m when a jury found that VR pioneer Oculus had violated a NDA and illegally used code from the game publisher. That may just be the beginning of the legal ramifications facing Oculus however, as Zenimax has just asked the court to block Oculus from using the code involved in the court case altogether, potentially blocking the sale of a good number of games utilizing the technology of the Oculus VR headset.

Oculus is appealing the case, and calls the prior ruling "legally flawed and factually unwarranted." To their credit, the court did agree that while Oculus had violated a non-disclosure agreement, it did not find that they had committed the larger crime of stealing trade secrets.

ZeniMax Media Inc. has been awarded a $500 million settlement in a virtual reality (VR) patent dispute with Facebook-owned Oculus. A jury in Texas found Oculus in violation of VR patents held by ZeniMax. Oculus in 2014 was acquired by Facebook in a $2 billion deal. ZeniMax owns id Software, a pioneering game studio led by John Carmack. ZeniMax alleges that core components of Oculus Rift VR headset were developed by John Carmack, when he was working at a ZeniMax subsidiary, making them ZeniMax' intellectual property. Carmack left ZeniMax to work for Oculus in 2013.

As you may remember, "Llano" was somewhat of a disappointment for AMD, to put it mildly. Production issues with partner Global Foundries meant that Llano's roll-out was affected and extended beyond its predicted time-frame. This, in conjunction with other various factors, such as lack of product appeal over disappointing performance and the usual competition from Intel, forced AMD to pull in its second-generation "Trinity" APU too soon. By the time production finally caught up, it ended up overproducing relative to diminishing demand, which resulted in unsold inventory, thus forcing an inventory write-down of "Llano" chips valued at around $100 million. This reduced the company's worth by nearly that much overnight, and tanked the value of the AMD stock. This, of course, didn't sit well with investors.

The as-of-yet ongoing securities fraud lawsuit over AMD's "Llano" APUs has just achieved a milestone, in having been authorized by the Court to proceed as a class action. The Court's decision doesn't imply that the defendants (Rory P. Read, Thomas J. Seifert, Richard A. Bergman, and Dr. Lisa T. Su) did anything wrong. The defendants have not been ordered to pay any money, no settlement has been reached, no money is available as of now and there is no guarantee that there will be in the future.

NVIDIA settled in a 2015 class-action lawsuit against it, for misrepresenting the amount of memory on GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards. The company has agreed to pay every buyer of the card USD $30 (per card), and also cover the legal fees of the class, amounting to $1.3 million. The company, however, did not specify how much money it has set aside for the payout, and whether it will compensate only those buyers who constitute the class (i.e. buyers in the U.S., since that's as far as the court's jurisdiction can reach), or the thousands of GTX 970 buyers worldwide.

"The settlement is fair and reasonable and falls within the range of possible approval," attorneys for the proposed Class said in the filing. "It is the product of extended arms-length negotiations between experienced attorneys familiar with the legal and factual issues of this case and all settlement class members are treated fairly under the terms of the settlement." The class alleged that NVIDIA falsified the amount of memory a GeForce GTX 970 GPU can really use, when an investigation found that it could only address 3.5 GB of it properly. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang apologized to buyers about the issue and promised that it would never happen again.

Microsoft has been hit by the first successful lawsuit over its forced Windows 10 upgrade. The first of possibly many, Teri Goldstein from California, successfully sued Microsoft for $10,000 in damages and legal fees over its deceptively designed Windows 10 upgrade software, which automatically downloaded and upgraded her computer's Windows 7 installation almost without the consent of the user. She convinced the court that the upgrade made her computer slower, and that she lost business due to the upgrade process and the slowing down of her computer. Microsoft dropped its appeal and paid up.

Microsoft is heavily criticized for the way it distributes its free Windows 10 upgrade for PCs with Windows 7 and Windows 8. What started out as an optional upgrade, quickly evolved into an almost unavoidable upgrade that forces itself upon the users, through clever design of the upgrade software's user interface. Microsoft recently changed Windows 10 upgrade into a "recommended update" for Windows 7/8, making users with auto-install for recommended updates discover that their machines have been upgraded almost without their consent. Could this be the first of many successful lawsuits over this issue at least in a precedent-driven American civil justice system?

This week on TechPowerUp News: New AMD CPUs and APUs hit the stores; Seagate served a class-action lawsuit over false reliability claims of its hard drives; and more details of AMD "Zen" architecture.

Hard drive major Seagate has been hit with a class action lawsuit, accusing it of abnormally high failure rates for its 1.5 TB and 3 TB internal and external/portable hard drives. It also accuses the company of false claims over "reliability" and "dependability" in its marketing.

The lawsuit cites data aggregated by cloud solutions company Backblaze. According to this data, a 3 TB Seagate hard drive is three times as likely to fail, as a Western Digital (WD) 3 TB hard drive. It's also ten times as likely to fail as a Hitachi drive. The data appears to look at percentage failure rate, and not raw failed drive volumes, so market-share and volumes shipped by each company is not relevant. Seagate is yet to respond to the lawsuit.

The United States Federal Trade Commission (US-FTC) has found that Samsung Electronics did not infringe upon patents held by NVIDIA. In a ruling made by Judge Thomas Pender on Friday (09/10), it's held that Samsung did not infringe two out of three NVIDIA-claimed patents, it did infringe upon a third one, but that patent is invalid because it's not a new invention compared to previously known patents.

Samsung manufactures the Exynos brand ARM SoCs for its own smartphones, which embed a graphics core that NVIDIA claims is based on patent infringing technology. NVIDIA, which claims that it invented the first GPU and released it in 1999, accused Samsung and Qualcomm of using its patents on graphics chip technology without permission. The company claims that both Samsung Exynos and Qualcomm Snapdragon (which make up a majority of Android device chips), breach its IPR. Its claims don't seem to hold water with the US-FTC. "We remain confident in our case," commented NVIDIA spokesperson Robert Sherbin to Reuters. The ruling will be reviewed by the full bench of the commission in February 2016.

Over-promising and under-delivering with its very first accelerated processing units (APU), codenamed "Llano," is coming back to haunt AMD, with a US District Court ruling that the company must face claims from investors over potential securities fraud. Launched in Q3-2012, AMD's A-series "Llano" APUs went largely unsold due to various factors including lack of product appeal, competition from Intel, forcing AMD to pull in its second-generation "Trinity" APU too soon. The related development first took shape in January 2014.

The swelling unsold "Llano" inventory forced an inventory writedown of $100 million, reducing the company's worth by nearly that much overnight, and tanking the value of the AMD stock. While AMD talked about the concept of an APU for years, Intel was the first to come out with a processor that integrates a graphics processor, with its Core i3 and Core i5 "Clarkdale" processors. The suit claims that AMD misrepresented production of "Llano" chips to its investors despite supply issues from its foundry partner GlobalFoundries, artificially inflating the value of the company in 2011-12. By the time production finally caught up, it ended up overproducing resulting in unsold inventory, and in consequence, the $100 million writeoff.

ZiiLabs Inc., Ltd. ("ZiiLabs") today announced that it filed a patent infringement lawsuit ("the lawsuit") in the United States against Samsung and Apple. The lawsuit alleges that certain products of Samsung (including various Galaxy phones and tablets, and laptops) and Apple (including various ranges of the iPhone and iPad, iMac and MacBook Pro) infringe a number of ZiiLabs patents.

ZiiLabs owns over 100 US patents in the graphics, processor and 3D spaces. Ten of these patents have been asserted in the lawsuit, in which ZiiLabs is claiming past and future damages for patent infringement, and injunctions against Samsung and Apple.

Macronix International Co., Ltd. , a global leader providing non-volatile memory solutions, announced that it has filed a patent infringement law suit against Spansion LLC and Spansion Inc. in the United States for infringement of seven Macronix patents directed to numerous aspects of flash memory. Macronix has taken this step to address Spansion's rampant infringement of Macronix's patent rights.

The seven patents relate to manufacturing of flash memory chips, compact memory with serial interfaces, security of memory cells, and circuit designs for flash memory. The patents in suit represent only a small fraction of Macronix world-wide patent portfolio.

Micron Technology, Inc., announced today that it reached an agreement with Oracle America Inc. to settle a lawsuit filed by Oracle against Micron in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The lawsuit alleged a conspiracy to increase DRAM prices and other violations of federal and state antitrust and unfair competition laws based on purported conduct for the period from Aug. 1, 1998, through at least June 15, 2002, and sought joint and several damages, trebled, as well as restitution, disgorgement, attorneys' fees, costs and injunctive relief. Pursuant to the settlement agreement, the parties agreed to a settlement and release of all claims and a dismissal with prejudice of the litigation.

The lawyer armies of both Google and Apple have yet another battle on their hands as last week one PanoMap Technologies, LLC, a virtually unknown company based in Florida, sued both of them for patent infringement.

Filed in Orlando federal court, PanoMap's complaint claims that the Street View feature of the Google Maps iOS app violates US Patent No. 6,563,529. This patent is entitled "Interactive system for displaying detailed view and direction in panoramic images" and it describes "A method and system for indicating the camera position, direction, and field of view in a map or panoramic image comprises a map image window which displays a map or panoramic image of the site to be studied (house, apartment, city, etc.)."

The 6,563,529 patent was given to scientist Jerry Jongerius back in 2003 and was transferred to Empire IP in 2011. PanoMap got a hold of it (through another transfer, gotta love this) only this month (on February 14th to be exact).

PanoMap says Google and Apple were aware of their infringement and wants triple damages.

Intel Corporation and the New York Attorney General have agreed to terminate the lawsuit alleging violation of U.S. and state antitrust laws that was filed by the New York Attorney General in November 2009.

The agreement, which follows a December 2011 court ruling that greatly reduced the scope of the New York Attorney General's lawsuit, expressly states that Intel does not admit either any violation of law or that the allegations in the complaint are true, and it calls for no changes to the way Intel does business. The agreement includes a payment of $6.5 million from Intel that is intended only to cover some of the costs incurred by the New York Attorney General in the litigation.

AMD has been slapped with a lawsuit by Quanta for allegedly selling faulty CPUs & GPUs that were unfit for purpose, since they didn't meet specified heat tolerances and subsequently failed. Taiwan-based Quanta may not have a name that the general public immediately recognizes, however they are actually the world's largest contract manufacturer of notebooks, so this lawsuit is a big deal. They claim that the faulty parts were used in notebooks made for NEC. The lawsuit was filed in a district court in San Jose, California and in the filing, Quanta claims they have "suffered significant injury to prospective revenue and profits". As Bloomberg reports, "the lawsuit also claims breach of warranty, negligent misrepresentation, civil fraud and interference with a contract."

Voltage Pictures, producers of movie Hurt Locker attempted to use a reverse class action tactic to extort hundreds of millions in 'settlement' claims aka extortion demands over alleged 'losses' due to 'piracy' - something that has never and can never, be quantified and proved. However, their attempt has failed miserably - plus read on for how Voltage Pictures did a little content 'theft' of their very own to make the movie.

The idea was to use the services of the US Copyright Group (USCG) to extract personal subscriber information from ISP's via subpoenas and then send demand letters averaging US $2,000 to hapless victims, with the hope of racking in a grand total of around US $94 million - way more than the film ever made, about US $12.6 million.

The USCG quickly unloaded lawsuit claims against 47K members of the unwitting American public, even as Voltage Picture spewed a stream of vitriol suggesting that the children and families of file sharers would hopefully "end up in jail".

explained DailyTech, putting it very well. Yes, let's get the kiddies in the name of corporate copyright and profit...

Seiko Epson Corporation ("Epson," TSE: 6724) today announced that it has agreed to settle for US$80 million civil lawsuits filed against it in the United States and United Kingdom by Nokia Corporation of Finland and its subsidiaries ("Nokia") seeking damages stemming from purchases of liquid crystal displays.

In November 2009, Nokia filed lawsuits in the United States and United Kingdom against Epson and its subsidiary companies including Epson Imaging Devices Corporation alleging violations of antitrust and competition laws. Epson has denied liability and vigorously defended the lawsuits. Because of the ongoing impacts of the lawsuits on its business and the expense of continuing litigation, however, the company has determined that settlement of the litigation is in Epson's best interests.

Three weeks ago, we brought you news that researchers had apparently found serious vulnerabilities in the firmware of HP printers that can allow hackers to cause the fuser to overheat and almost make the paper inside catch fire. HP dismissed these claims as exaggerated, but said that they would look into it. Three days later, we reported that some enterprising New Yorker called David Goldblatt sued HP, alleging that he would not have bought their printers had he known about this problem beforehand, which seems a bit unlikely when you consider that HP is the number one printer brand by a mile. Now HP have released patches for these vulnerabilities and issued the following press release:

In perhaps one of the more ironic legal moves to be seen recently, Sony's clause in its Terms of Service preventing PlayStation 3 owners from filing class action lawsuits has itself attracted a class action lawsuit! The lawsuit was filed in Northern California in November, by a man on behalf of PS3 owners who signed up for the PlayStation Network before September, when the ToS were updated and this anti-class action clause added.

The killer clause is buried deep into the contract and is very hard to spot, requiring the contract to be read all the way through with a fine toothcomb - if the reader can rise to the challenge of reading the complicated and dry legalese it's written in. Compounding the problem is that the agreement isn't even readily available online for anyone to study - it can only be viewed on the PS3 itself (so the console is already used before you can even see the agreement - hardly fair?) and appears near the bottom of the 21-page form. Previous agreements had been posted online for anyone to inspect. On top of that, the only way of opting out of it, is to mail a physical letter to Sony within 30 days of agreeing to the ToS - very inconvenient and likely to be forgotten by the average person. The main thrust of the lawsuit are allegations of unfair business practices, since PS3 owners are forced to choose between forfeiting their rights or access to the PSN. Note that since Sony introduced this clause, Electronic Arts and Microsoft have both introduced similar clauses, which doesn't put them in a very good light either and potentially at the receiving end of a lawsuit themselves.

Three days ago, we brought you news of how researchers have made proof-of-concept attacks on HP printers by reprogramming their firmware. Among other things, these attacks could deliberately cause the fuser in a printer to overheat and singe the paper, until shut down by a built-in unoverridable thermal switch, preventing a fire. Now, in light of this, a lawsuit has been filed by David Goldblatt of New York, seeking damages for fraudulent and deceptive business practices and is looking for class action status: "As a result of HP's failure to require the use of digital signatures to authenticate software upgrades, hackers are able to reprogram the HP Printers' software with malicious software without detection," the suit says. "Once the HP printers' software is maliciously reprogrammed, the HP printers can be remotely controlled by computer hackers over the Internet, who can then steal personal information, attack otherwise secure networks, and even cause physical damage to the HP printers, themselves." Note that HP has used digital signatures since 2009 to authenticate the firmware updates, helping to mitigate this potential problem in recent models.

Despite this though, HP still intends to patch the firmware to eliminate threats from this hack, which exploits bugs in the firmware. As these attacks have only actually been demonstrated in the lab and no actual losses have been incurred by Goldblatt, it makes one wonder if he is just using the prevailing American "victim culture" to try and make a quick buck off HP. HP are the top printer brand, mainly because their products are excellent, performing well and lasting a long time, plus other companies' printers and embedded devices have the same problems, so it seems unlikely that he would really not have bought HP printers.

In late September, S3 Graphics, still a subsidiary of VIA Technology and soon to be transferred to HTC, dragged Apple Inc. to court over charges of patent infringement related to graphics component IP of nearly all Apple products, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and iMac. Last month, AMD, now a main supplier of graphics processors for Apple's Mac products, intervened with a counter lawsuit claiming it owned the patents that S3 has asserted against Apple, and sought an immediate halt to S3's patent case against Apple.

In an October 28 filing with the ITC, S3 says that a federal judge struck down a request for an immediate halt into S3's case, but the Commission is scheduled to release its final decision on November 15. The case struck down is (rather was) Advanced Micro Devices Inc. v. S3 Graphics Co., 11cv965, U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware (Wilmington).

MOSAID Technologies Inc. (TSX:MSD) today announced that it has initiated patent infringement litigation against NVIDIA Corporation, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. and Interphase Corporation. The suit was filed on April 7, 2011 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division.

In its complaint, MOSAID asserts that NVIDIA, Freescale and Interphase have infringed, and continue to infringe certain patents related primarily to power management techniques, and microprocessor architecture. The accused devices include graphics processors, application processors, microcontrollers, and system-on-chip devices. These microcomponents products are used in mobile, automotive, consumer and communications applications.

Spansion Inc., a leading provider of Flash memory solutions, today announced the filing of an additional three separate patent infringement complaints against Samsung to further address past and ongoing widespread patent violations in a broad and growing range of Samsung Flash memory products. Spansion filed the complaints with the International Trade Commission (ITC) and in the U.S. District Courts in the Eastern District of Virginia and (an ITC mirror case) in the Northern District of California. The company first initiated action against Samsung in November, 2008, with the ITC and the U.S. District Court in Delaware. The judge in the first ITC case has set a target date of mid September to issue his initial determination.

Spansion's ITC complaints seek to exclude and enjoin from the U.S. market infringing Samsung Flash memory products and downstream products that contain them. Flash memory is a critical part of billions of dollars worth of consumer electronics such as MP3 players, cell phones, digital cameras, and tablet computers. Over the years, Samsung's infringement has and continues to unjustly enrich Samsung by many hundreds of millions of dollars. The District Court actions also seek compensation for Samsung's unjust enrichment in disregard of Spansion's extensive patent holdings.

Toshiba Corporation announced today that on May 14, 2009, Toshiba filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin against Imation Corp. ("Imation"), several manufacturers and several distributors of recordable DVD media, as a means to prohibit infringement of Toshiba's DVD patents. Toshiba's complaint seeks damages for past infringement and requests that the court enjoin the sale, manufacture, and importation into the United States of recordable DVD media by the defendant companies named in the complaint. The infringing recordable DVD media is sold in the United States under at least the Imation and Memorex brand names.