The issue likely isn't an NDA but rather IP assignment clauses in contracts. These types of IP assignment clauses are legal and mean that inventions and developments an employee or contract develops during the course of their engagement become property of their employer.

Most companies that deal with IP need to have such clauses in their agreements otherwise they could fail due diligence.

It would be surprising if the TRT-Luckey agreement didn't have IP assignment clauses.

> Lucky may be saved by the fact that a lot of the technology in the original Rift prototypes was developed by USC's ICT which was fine letting him use it.

That doesn't seem to be the case: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/23rh0m/ken_perlin_o... Luckey was certainly aware of the Wide5 HMD from USC http://www.fakespacelabs.com/Wide5.html http://people.ict.usc.edu/~suma/papers/olson-vr2011poster.pd... fairly early in his VR work (see http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=13741 and http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=13158&star... ) but the Wide5 apparently has different lenses, doesn't use PC-side software distortion correction and uses two screens (the consumer Rift will too, but all Rift versions up to and including Dev Kit 2 https://forums.oculus.com/viewtopic.php?t=7544 are single-screen).

Interesting. I seem to remember Mark painting a different picture when I spoke to him, but this was over a year ago and my memory may be deceiving me. It seems like they came up with similar ideas at the same time, which happens all the time in tech.

> Even if I knew about the technology before working there, I would still technically be violating a NDA.

You might be in danger of someone arguing you are violating the NDA, and this might be sufficient liability that you don't want to take that risk, but "technically" you would not be violating almost any reasonable NDA (of course, someone could draft one that was insane) if you learned the information in question through a source that is not covered by the NDA (and this is true even if you "learned" the information a second time due to it being disclosed in some other way later).

As far as I could tell, they're not alleging he stole any technology. The patent they mention in the lawsuit is for a method of mapping real-world video footage into stereoscopic panoramas that can be viewed with existing, off the shelf VR headsets. They're claiming that he used "feedback" that they provided under NDA to improve his headset, but carefully avoid claiming they created even an iota of the technology used in the Rift.

Good point. Abrash brought a huge amount of Valve VR IP with him as well (with Valve's permission AFAIK).