Facebook won a pair of legal victories yesterday in a follow-up to the ruling last year that called for them to pay Zenimax $500 million in damages for copyright infringement over virtual reality technology. Bloomberg reports a that this penalty will be cut in half to $250 million, and you know the old saying: A quarter billion here, a quarter billion there... after a while it starts to add up to real money. They also report that a U.S. District Court judge has ruled against Zenimax's demand that sale of Oculus Rift headsets be banned. Here's word:

Kinkeade affirmed the jury’s February 2017 award of $200 million for breach of contract and $50 million for copyright infringement. He wiped out the other $250 million awarded by jurors, including the damages against Oculus co-founders Brendan Iribe and Palmer Luckey.

A ZeniMax lawyer argued at a hearing a year ago that the Facebook unit was continuing to infringe its copyrights and “a permanent injunction is the only way to stop it.” Oculus argued that a sales ban would place an unfair hardship on the company, its business partners and customers. The judge sided with Oculus.

Oculus contended that the copyright infringement wasn’t “substantial” and that damages should be thrown out. The company said just seven lines of computer code in Oculus software were copied literally from ZeniMax “out of approximately 42 billion lines” introduced as evidence at trial.

ZeniMax said it’s pleased to have won $250 million -- plus $54 million in interest -- and disappointed that the jury verdict was cut in half.