[HN Gopher] SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
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SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
Author : phiresky
Score : 621 points
Date : 2022-10-06 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simulavr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (simulavr.com)
| iamjk wrote:
| Someone fix the grammar on that last statement!
|
| "We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta"
| blantonl wrote:
| Times are getting tough generating revenue from customers.
| chatterhead wrote:
| cableshaft wrote:
| >We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta
|
| >...Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who
| want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose
| productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and
| laptops.
|
| Hate to break it to you, but if you don't think that Mark
| Zuckerberg is actively trying to create VR devices that are
| general-purpose productivity devices aimed at replacing PCs and
| laptops, you haven't been watching some of their recent videos
| about the new headsets and prototype headsets they're working on.
| He very much is aiming for that market with future devices (not
| the Quest 2).
|
| Here's a couple:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMpWH6vDZ8E
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zHDkdkqd1I
|
| Also he's described their Project Cambria headset as intended for
| productivity, as in the following article:
|
| "What's different about Project Cambria?
|
| The most important description we've received about Project
| Cambria comes from The Information; according to the publication,
| Meta employees have alternately described the headset as a
| "laptop for the face" or a "Chromebook for the face." It's a
| device Zuckerberg hopes people will use to get work done rather
| than being aimed primarily at gamers as with previous headsets."
|
| https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-project-cambria-what-we-kno...
| SCLeo wrote:
| If I am not wrong, this is an antitrust suit, meaning it is
| about what they are selling, not what they are developing. If
| the product has been launched, there literally cannot be a
| monopoly.
| bradyd wrote:
| They are both selling VR headsets. Claiming they are not
| competitors is like trying to claim electric cars are not in
| competition with gas powered cars because they are different
| technology.
| saghm wrote:
| >> >...Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers
| who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose
| productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and
| laptops.
|
| > Hate to break it to you, but if you don't think that Mark
| Zuckerberg is actively trying to create VR devices that are
| general-purpose productivity devices aimed at replacing PCs and
| laptops, you haven't been watching some of their recent videos
| about the new headsets and prototype headsets they're working
| on. He very much is aiming for that market with future devices
| (not the Quest 2).
|
| It sounds like they're saying that Meta doesn't currently sell
| anything that competes with what they're currently selling, and
| the info you give doesn't seem to contradict that. I'd question
| the premise that releasing a marketing video for a product that
| doesn't exist counts as being "in competition". They might be
| in competition in the future, but it doesn't seem like they are
| right now.
| novok wrote:
| There is a segment that uses the virtual desktop with the
| oculus quest 2 quite extensively, so you still have that
| argument with their current lineup of devices IMO.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Mark wants to be able to sell apps and ads on his end-to-end
| controlled platform, that is it.
|
| He missed the boat on browsers and smartphones, so he is aiming
| for total monopoly of what he believes is the next-big-
| thing(tm).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm still skeptical that it _is_ The Next Big Thing.
|
| I wonder if Zuckerberg suspects it might not be as well but,
| hey, Hail Mary!
| bamboozled wrote:
| Even if it's the next big thing you know a better iHeadset
| will follow months later and be a much better product with
| less privacy and data theft built in.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Except it will have no games, cost $4k and will probably
| be difficult to port anything to. Great for Apple's
| current mbpro market but ignored by everyone else.
| vkou wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it is the next big thing, or a large
| flop.
|
| Meta is in trouble, and it needs to do something to retain
| relevance. This is something, and Meta is doing it.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| He probably believes he has the unique ability to make it
| the next big thing.
| wongarsu wrote:
| My bet would be more on AR than VR, and maybe it's not the
| _next_ big thing but the big thing after the next one.
|
| But that's fine for Meta. Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp
| might all be running out of growth, but they are all big
| enough that Meta can afford to invest in something that
| will only pay off in a decade or two, as long as the payoff
| is big enough. Gaming-VR headsets are just a good way to
| get the technology into people's hands right now, and
| iterate on it.
| rngname22 wrote:
| You can argue that Meta is at the very head of the pack
| with AR.
|
| See this demo of Quest Pro pass-through AR: https://www.r
| eddit.com/r/oculus/comments/xvzxj2/new_footage_...
| sam1r wrote:
| Then again, however, a 100b size company -- like meta
| --inevitably has to go for moonshots when their primary
| source of revenue is steadily declining.
|
| Seems like he has no choice. Even if it doesn't work or
| we're all skeptical -- he better play along and go for it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think you're right, but I disagree that he has no
| choice -- he can find some other "moonshot". Pushing VR
| (or AR) seems like something he thinks will play well
| with the stock holders; and if he is as skeptical as some
| of us then he's kind of playing them for rubes.
|
| Hearing them describe their own product as "Chromebook
| for the face" just reconfirms my suspicious that this is
| a doomed product.
| ehnto wrote:
| It's a very different experience to how we currently
| consume media, and I am not really sure it has mass appeal
| even with some kind of perfect execution. I am prepared to
| be totally wrong mind you.
|
| It's an incredible tool and way to engage with virtual
| worlds, but the question we should be asking isn't "Is VR
| technology good enough" which I think people get stuck on.
| Really the question is "Does everyone want to be in a
| virtual world regularly?" and my intuition having spent a
| good amount of time in VR is that the answer to that is
| actually no.
|
| I love video games, so much so that I even try to make
| them. I spend many hours playing in virtual worlds, but I
| very, very rarely want to use VR. I'm the perfect candidate
| for the technology, and it's honestly mindblowing when I do
| use it, but it's just not a casual experience. Even if we
| had the perfect, unobtrusive and lightweight technology,
| you are still choosing to disconnect from your current
| environment and spend time fully engaged with a different
| world in a way that games and TV don't. That can be really
| exhausting.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Personally, I think that both TV and movies are going to
| be driving VR adoption. The Netflix of VR movies could be
| huge if they were able to offer the right content. A
| fully virtual theatre that gets new releases could also
| be big. The edge that VR had in these areas is that it
| essentially gives you a private theatre that you can
| enjoy with your friends and family. Leveraging a social
| network so that you can deliver notifications like "X is
| currently watching Y. Click to join" would be big. People
| already kind of do this with watch parties and discord.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I love VR, but it is terrible for things like watching
| movies. Imagine sitting on your couch and putting on a
| movie. How often do you do that? If it is more often than
| 'once in a while', are you actually sitting and watching
| it intently the entire timee? Are you eating, or drinking
| anything, or petting your cat or dog, or snuggling on the
| couch with your SO or kids? You can't do that with a VR
| headset on because _you can 't see anything else at all_.
| If you grab for a glass you have to switch to pass-
| through mode and back again, or take off the headset. You
| also can't do _anything_ but look at the screen.
|
| It isn't really something that people want to do.
|
| Exceptions of course would be to do it with someone
| remotely, like a friend or a family member -- it is a
| good way to potentially 'hang out' with people who aren't
| physically there. But the same caveats apply.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Well, I do watch movies with others in VR on a fairly
| regular basis and it's great. Could be better, headsets
| need to be more comfortable and pass through has room for
| improvement but both of those things are on the very near
| horizon.
|
| Look at the cambria demos, they're already doing mixed
| reality by blending the room with the experience. No
| reason that can't be used to put your couch, coffee table
| and SO in the virtual theatre. You also have to consider
| that a lot of the younger people using these won't have
| dogs or kids to worry about.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Sure, it has use cases, but the fact is that something
| like a phone, or a tablet, or a TV can be used and not
| used within a fraction of a second as required. Putting
| on a headset is like going to a movie theater -- it is
| fine for _occasions_ but it isn 't something I can see
| people wanting to do regularly.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| We understand Meta sometimes future projects that their devices
| will have broad office applications, but we're skeptical it has
| any teeth.
|
| Consider that Atari tried to compete with office PCs in the
| early 80s with their 8-bit family, and failed:
| https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_...
|
| It's hard to focus on multiple things at once, and we're
| skeptical that the bureaucratic forces in play at a large
| company like Meta will allow them to do a good job at making
| their gaming platform _also_ one that people actually want to
| work in.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Ben Thompson is fairly bullish on Enterprise Metaverses after
| having used Workrooms:
| https://stratechery.com/2021/enterprise-metaverses-
| horizon-w...
|
| > I don't want to go too far given I've only tried Workrooms
| out once, but this feels like something real. And, just as
| importantly, there is, thanks to COVID, a real use case. Of
| course companies will need to be convinced, and hardware will
| need to be bought, but that's another reason why the work
| angle is so compelling: companies are willing to pay for
| tools that increase productivity to a much greater extent
| than consumers are.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I'm a lot less important than Ben but just wanted to +1
| that it's pretty compelling use case once experiencing it.
| It's not there yet, mostly due to resolution issues and
| long term comfort issues, but it's close enough to show
| it's absolutely viable.
|
| I bought the quest2 since it was cheap as a pandemic
| entertainment device and while I never play it, I regularly
| wish for a VR monitor (eg a high res nreal air)
| random314 wrote:
| What about loss of facial expressivity? I guess
| whispering to your neighbor works a lot better. And how
| is the whiteboarding experience?
| MadcapJake wrote:
| "Do a good job" is different from intent to compete. Horizon
| Workrooms, keyboard passthrough, and multi-app support
| screams non-entertainment functionality. And that's just
| what's been released pre-Quest Pro...
| cableshaft wrote:
| And there are plenty of instances of companies that have gone
| under when a big parent company decides to incorporate your
| business as a 'feature' in part of their big monster product.
|
| I'm not saying it's going to definitely happen and the
| company is doomed or anything, it's certainly possible that
| SimulaVR will come out on top for productivity devices (or
| peacefully coexist as an alternative alongside Meta's
| offering). But it shouldn't ignore what Meta is doing either,
| especially when they're actively saying they're moving into
| their turf.
|
| At the very least, it looks like Meta will put up a helluva
| fight.
| kanetw wrote:
| Of course anything Meta does is a bit worrisome. I just
| don't think we're in the same niche-- IMO Meta is
| fundamentally built on data collection, and VR is just a
| side effect.
|
| Unless Meta decides to abandon that, I think we'll have a
| niche.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| Enterprise loves data collection so that's really a
| perfect fit for their next phase customer base. That's
| why I think the Meta account system was important for
| them to get done pre Quest Pro launch (and significantly
| early too so any issues are worked out before enterprise
| demos start)
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > IMO Meta is fundamentally built on data collection
|
| Isn't their whole Metaverse thing a gamble to get away
| from that? Why does data collection prevent creating a
| good VR experience. If anything it should align goals
| well (spend as much time in VR as possible, so as much in
| VR as possible). Besides, most DataCollection companies
| offer CollectionFree enterprise contracts... which is
| where the money for this probably is.
|
| (Btw I'm a huge fan of this sort of product and I hope a
| respectful company wins.. I'm just skeptical that meta
| can't fund their way to success. )
| nonplus wrote:
| > Isn't their whole Metaverse thing a gamble to get away
| from that?
|
| Many of us think Meta is trying to gain as much market as
| they can early, so they can leverage eye tracking and mm
| wave tech for very invasive biometric collection and ad
| targeting in the future. Reasonable minds can disagree on
| that.
| romanhn wrote:
| This is similar to saying "Facebook is fundamentally
| built on data collection, and social networking is just a
| side effect." Technically true, but not much consolation
| for all the social networks that didn't go all in on
| advertising and perished.
|
| Wish you the best of luck either way, this is an exciting
| area and more competition is great. They definitely are
| competition though.
| kanetw wrote:
| Yeah, of course, it's a tough space to be in. Just saying
| that we need to carve out a niche where Meta can't
| compete vs try to fight Meta head on.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| I am failing to see a separate niche here. There are only
| so many ways you can break down office productivity focus
| and still have a market to support you. Your team should
| accept the facts and stop trying to wiggle out of
| competing with your--frankly--main rival in this space.
| It doesn't do any justice to avoid this truth. Honestly,
| I'd be shocked if you weren't already closely monitoring
| their work and its reaction in the market.
|
| I think Meta's strategy was the right one. The only execs
| who would even consider adopting a virtual work model
| would be gamers who are already familiar with the tool.
| Gaming was their way to get in the minds of their
| potential next phase enterprise customers.
| MikusR wrote:
| Based on comments in this thread, SimulaVR thinks of
| itself the same way Microsoft did when they made Windows
| phone.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| I totally disagree with this. Early gaming consoles
| (~70s) took off roughly a decade before early PCs (~80s).
| Yet many of the people who bought the latter had little
| interest in the former. They were two completely distinct
| markets (with some, but clearly not extensive overlap).
|
| We've had many people tell us (often on Hacker News
| actually) that they're not super interested in VR gaming,
| but are _very_ interested in VR computing.
|
| (I myself am one of these people BTW; despite working in
| VR for half a decade now, I have almost no interest in VR
| gaming, and wouldn't be interested in the field were it
| not for its enormous potential as a new thinking tool).
| majormajor wrote:
| "We don't think they're competent enough to be a competitor"
| is a bad way to judge whether you're competing with someone.
| It's like Apple laughing at the IBM PC.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Looking at the new videos related to the upcoming Quest Pro
| that will be announced next week, the simulavr guys are
| dead wrong.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AR_MR_XR/comments/xwjzni/meta_ques
| t...
| georgewsinger wrote:
| What you're seeing: a Meta headset tethered to a laptop
| over WiFi running Immersed.
|
| What you're not seeing: a standalone VR headset running a
| VR Desktop OS natively with bleeding edge pixel density
| (i.e., like the Simula One).
|
| We understand that Meta has some cool tools in its app
| store which can be used to get a feel for VR computing.
| But analogously, you could also purchase word processors
| for early gaming consoles too:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtariWriter
|
| Our view is that dedicated VR computing devices are what
| the market actually needs.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| apple would agree
| spiffytech wrote:
| Does Simula's tethered option affect this calculus?
| mlajtos wrote:
| Wait, is that demo rigged? The keyboard in passthrough is
| not the keyboard of the MacBook.
| richard___ wrote:
| The AR pass through in that clip blows the simulavr pass
| through wayyyyy out the water!!!
| taneq wrote:
| Imagine if during the Microsoft antitrust case, they
| subpoenaed Apple, Compaq, Oracle, Sony and some small
| startups for their entire short- and long-term business
| strategy documentation. Oh, and all their user metrics and
| any telemetry.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| >It's hard to focus on multiple things at once, and we're
| skeptical that the bureaucratic forces in play at a large
| company like Meta will allow them to do a good job at making
| their gaming platform also one that people actually want to
| work in.
|
| The problem with your assertion is that you over count how
| many multiple things Meta has to do. What will make for a
| very good gaming VR Headset will also be a very good
| professional and productivity headset.
|
| The key aspects which Mark Zuckerberg laid out personally in
| the recent VR Prototypes unveil pretty universally hit both
| targets. Comfortable light weight headsets with incredible
| fidelity is desirable for all VR applications. Not just
| gaming.
| tomxor wrote:
| > Consider that Atari tried to compete with office PCs in the
| early 80s with their 8-bit family, and failed
|
| I don't think that's very accurate. The Atari ST had a pretty
| good following compared to personal computers of the time
| much like the Amiga... The fact is that most computer
| companies from back then did not survive far beyond the
| decade but they had their time. So it's not really accurate
| to say they failed when Acorn, Amiga, Amstrad...etc, all
| "failed", in that they didn't produce more than a handful of
| unique and fairly incompatible computers with no clear
| future, but that had a market and sold with success in their
| time frame none the less.
| antiterra wrote:
| I don't think he meant the computers as a whole were
| unsuccessful, but the bid to enter the business sector was.
| The common consensus is they failed because Atari was so
| strongly associated with games. I assume there are possibly
| greater reasons, but it is true Tramiel and others tried
| the pivot and it failed.
| [deleted]
| bilekas wrote:
| This seems a bit wild and super anti-competitive, of course it's
| hard to say with only hearing from simulaVR's perspective.
|
| The content of information they're required to handover also
| seems incredibly sensitive, wouldn't that basically give Meta
| more 'Market Research' simply by reviewing these documents ?
|
| It does seem a little bit like the corporate version of a 'Slap
| suite' also given how financially restricted Simula seem.
| madamelic wrote:
| Sounds like ~~Meta~~ Facebook is planning on moving into
| SimulaVR's turf and wants to know all the details for free and is
| abusing a legal process to get it.
|
| Doesn't seem like a coincidence they are the only tiny headset
| subpeonaed while others are big (public) corporations.
| tmpfile wrote:
| Couldn't SimulaVR request all the same documents from Meta in
| response? Or is it a one-way process?
|
| I'm sure Meta's legal team would find reasons why they wouldn't
| have to be responsive or other ways narrow the scope. SimulaVR in
| turn could use the same arguments against Meta.
| awinter-py wrote:
| simulavr isn't a party to the suit, their powers here are going
| to be more limited
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| As someone who is _not_ a lawyer, my question is what are the
| potential response avenues to a subpoena like this. That is, Meta
| has essentially demanded a ton of work from SimulaVR, for free. I
| very much agree with Simula 's response of "We can't afford stuff
| like this".
|
| So, realistically, what are Simula's options? I imagine a "fuck
| off" response won't go over well with the court. Can they give
| some cursory information? Is there some way they can challenge
| the subpoena as overly burdensome?
|
| I hate how our legal system makes it so easy to demand work from
| someone else, when the burden on the demanding party is so
| extremely low. Why shouldn't Meta need to pay hundreds of dollars
| an hour for the information they are requesting? The lawyers are
| definitely charging that much.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| This kind of subpoena is boilerplate. No one actually expects
| SimulaVR to provide all this information or to show up for a
| deposition.
|
| This is actually how it will go down:
|
| SimulaVR-Lawyer: Hey Meta-lawyer, I got your subpoena. We're a
| tiny company and this is overbroad. What do you guys actually
| want?
|
| Meta-lawyer: Totally understand. Can we get a declaration from
| your founder about what your company is trying to do, who their
| competitors are, and few info about your financials? If you
| have pitch decks for investors, we'd love to get that as well.
|
| SimulaVR-Lawyer: That seems doable but can the financials be
| filed under seal and attorney-eyes-only?
|
| Meta-lawyer: Yeah that makes sense.
|
| SimulaVR-Lawyer: Lemme talk to the founders and follow up with
| you. Let's talk later about what the declaration will look
| like.
|
| Meta-lawyer: Thank you - appreciate it, and looking forward to
| hearing back soon.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I do wonder if this blog post might be used by Meta in a way the
| authors didn't intend. Stating that they are not at all worried
| about competition from Meta is exactly what Meta needs to present
| as evidence.
|
| Aside from that I'm not convinced SimulaVR shouldn't be worried.
| Regardless of whether Meta is targeting the productivity space
| intentionally (it is, I think) SimulaVR can very easily be a
| casualty of their dominance. For example I was interested in
| buying into SimulaVR but I probably won't if the Quest Pro is
| even close to good enough because along with that I get access to
| all the Oculus games etc.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Meta's defense on not being anti-competitive is to use the legal
| system to force all potential competitors to turn over incredibly
| sensitive information about their business & operations...
|
| how is this even _allowed_ under the law? Can Facebook really
| just demand this?
| [deleted]
| ivraatiems wrote:
| That's not really what's happening here. Meta can't just steal
| that info; it goes to Meta's lawyers, who will review it and
| decide what to do based on it. Meta itself won't get to see it,
| necessarily, unless the court lets them.
|
| You might say "well, you can't trust lawyers" - but most
| attorneys actually take the security of processes like these
| _extremely_ seriously, because they 'll lose their jobs (and
| law licenses) if they don't.
|
| But anyway, the right thing to do if SimulaVR doesn't want to
| reveal this info is to oppose the subpoena and try to get it
| quashed. Not write angry blog posts.
| chatterhead wrote:
| You can't trust lawyers. They are all apart of the same
| international guild.
|
| The right thing to do is tell the US gov. to go fuck itself,
| close down your operations in the US and reestablish
| elsewhere.
|
| That's the right thing to do.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Are there rules preventing Meta from seeing the info? It
| seems like they would be allowed, themselves, to look at
| anything considered evidence in the case, barring an order
| from the judge to the contrary.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| I believe what SimulaVR would do is petition the court to
| seal their responses and put conditions on who and how
| those responses can be viewed. Not an uncommon thing to do.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Frankly there is nothing worse than seeing a legal notice. At
| best it means thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and added
| stress/lost time. At worst its the end of a company.
| Roark66 wrote:
| If this is actually how US's justice system works it is even more
| bonkers than I thought. Could someone versed in this legal system
| explain, please? Is is any accused that can demand
| documents/data/free research from vaguely related third parties,
| or only large companies? Enquiring minds want to know!
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It's not nearly as crazy as it sounds. If you were accused of
| murder and your alibi was you were at a bar, then the court
| could force the bar to produce any video footage they had, any
| records of transactions etc. If it was claimed that I was at
| said bar on said night, I could be forced to appear in court
| and produce any diary entries I had, any photos on my phone
| from that night. These are reasonable requests.
| Someone wrote:
| In-between Meta's "to show that we have competition, we would
| like to show company Foo's documents on X, Y and Z" and this
| subpoena is a judge who decides on whether those documents
| would help them reach a decision in this case, and whether it's
| reasonable to ask Foo to do that work.
|
| Also, the data you provide goes to the court, not (directly) to
| Meta.
|
| I also think you can ask the court to keep (parts of) the data
| from the public record. That would require an argument as to
| why making it public would harm you.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| If one is accused of antitrust practices (as Meta is by the
| FTC), your defense is to show that there's actually
| competition. It's not that Meta that wants the documents for
| corporate espionage (or whatever), but that they want to prove
| that SimulaVR is competing just fine in the market that
| contains Meta. This is explained in the article, which many
| here clearly didn't read past the headline. This is roughly the
| same as subpoenaing someone as a witness; you don't really have
| a choice.
|
| In fact, Meta themselves won't be looking at the documents;
| their lawyers, the FCC, and the rest of the court will. This is
| standard procedure, and no different from if SMALL_CORP sued
| BIG_CORP; BIG_CORP would still have to comply with subpoenas
| from SMALL_CORP.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| So someone is sued for anticompetitive practices and that
| gives them alibi for looking directly into others' books, and
| they're just supposed to trust Meta will forget all the
| information afterwards?
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| IANAL, but AIUI in theory all major competitors get
| subpoenaed and then everything they say becomes part of the
| public record - so everyone sees everyone's cards laid out.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| How exactly does that change anything? Meta is a 100000x
| larger company, they can do much more with that info than
| the others. And what about foreign competitors? What
| about not yet founded/stealth competitors? What about
| competitors only maybe planning to release a product
| (e.g. Apple)?
| unknownaccount wrote:
| What happens if SimulaVR tells these lawyers to pound sand? I
| cannot imagine if I ran a small buisness and I was the victim
| of this how I would afford it.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| You're found in contempt of court. If you disagree with the
| subpoena, you're allowed to file that with the court, and
| the judge will review it.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| I suppose this is why it's a bad idea to run any company
| from the USA. Being victimized by their corrupt legal
| system at your own expense... This sort of thing doesn't
| happen when you run your company from behind Tor and use
| crypto for payment.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Most legal systems do this: if you're accused of doing X,
| and your claim that you weren't doing X hinges on
| evidence that can only be produced by other parties, you
| explain that to the court, and then the court can decide
| to compel those other parties to produce that evidence in
| the interest of a fair trial.
|
| In this case, Meta is being accused of anti-competitive
| behaviour. Their claim is that there is plenty of
| competition and that if they are to be put on trial, then
| they should be able to present evidence that there is
| competition. The court agreed with that statement. Meta
| themselves cannot produce that evidence, because they are
| not privy to business goings-on at other companies, all
| they can see is other companies that are--in their
| opinion--competing in the same space. As such, Meta can
| only go "we consider the following companies our
| competition, their documents should make it ample clear
| that we are in competition" with enough of an additional
| explanation to justify each company listed. And then the
| court goes "very well, this is motivated enough to
| justify us compelling these companies to produce the
| evidence that you claim exists as part of discovery".
|
| The only quirk here is the claim that a small company
| can't reasonably do what is being requested of them by
| the courts. And again: not by Meta, but by the courts.
| Meta doesn't get these documents, only Meta's legal team
| gets those documents, Meta employees don't get to see
| what's in the many boxes of discovery material that their
| legal team is going to receive. Not Bob from accounting,
| not Kelly from finance, and not Mark from the CEO team.
| Only the lawyers do.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| Its still unethical. First off its not that big enough of
| a deal to warrant the financial obliteration of a small
| buisness via legal fees/airfare/hotels etc. Nobody died
| or has their life at stake here. Second off the company
| should be compensated for their expenses(lost
| buisness/airfare/legal fees). If this doesnt happen, then
| its clearly a court unjustly financially harming a small
| buisness. Thankfully we live in an era where its now
| possible to operate a company anonymously and not be
| beholden to unethical national legal systems operating at
| the behest of the ultra-wealthy.
|
| You try to downplay the severity by saying "only Meta
| lawyers can see the contents" but that is still wrong.
| Whos to say these lawyers wont steal your trade secrets
| and use them to their own advantage? These people are
| still on Meta's payroll and nothing prevents Meta from
| asking its lawyers to divulge those secrets. To trust
| them not to is incredibly naive.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > You try to downplay the severity by saying "only Meta
| lawyers can see the contents" but that is still wrong.
| Whos to say these lawyers wont steal your trade secrets
| and use them to their own advantage?
|
| They are ethically and legally bound not to. They can be
| disbarred, sanctioned, sued by SimulaVR, even thrown in
| prison. You're here ranting about the US court system,
| but you're wrong about a lot of it.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| Just because they "could be disbarred" or go to prison
| does for it also doesn't mean they physically can't or
| won't do it. So I'm actually not wrong about anything I
| said here.
| [deleted]
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Lawyers, especially highly paid giant-tech-firm
| representing lawyers, tend to play by the rules when it
| comes to the actual court process itself. Could they pass
| all this confidential information on to Mark? Absolutely,
| trivially so even. Would it be a crime to do so?
| Absolutely also that. Are they going to risk their firm
| for a client? No lawyer playing at the level of Meta or
| Apple would be that stupid.
|
| When it comes to lawyers, you get what you pay for, and
| Meta pays _a lot_ for excellent lawyers who make sure
| they do everything by the book and follow the letter of
| the law where possible, and the spirit of the law where
| it can be defended if it needs to be, in order to get
| cases thrown out or settled before they make it to actual
| trial.
|
| Most cases die in discovery, exactly because the lawyers
| (and only the lawyers) get to see everyone's cards, and
| get to say "look we can go to trial, but we've both seen
| all the documents, and it's plainly clear that one of us
| is right".
|
| "But they can air all that dirty laundry during trial!"
| no, they can't, because unless that dirty laundry is
| necessary to demonstrate competition, which would be
| stupidly unlikely, you don't just get to reveal every
| document that your legal team has access to just because
| you feel like it. Doing so can get you removed from
| trial, sanctioned, or even disbarred, depending on how
| severe the impact of your misconduct is. The current
| issue is about discovery: you and your team (and NOT your
| client) get to find the information you need by sifting
| through thousands of documents.
| dtech wrote:
| In the US legal system a non-government entity can force any
| 3rd party to spend time and money for their benefit? That
| seems pretty weird.
| vkou wrote:
| Yes, that's what a subpoena is. And it can be done in
| pretty much any legal system.
|
| If you're on trial for murder, and your alibi is 'I was at
| work', you're going to need your boss to come in to testify
| on your behalf. If he doesn't feel like it, the court will
| compel him to show up and testify, on his time, and on his
| expense, under penalty of prejury.
|
| This is a good thing.
| jessaustin wrote:
| If I was at work when the murder occurred, two or three
| discussions between police and my boss and coworkers
| would prevent a murder trial in the first place.
| Prosecutors don't like defendants with solid alibis.
|
| Probably FTC has already done equivalent investigation,
| which calls the subpoena described in TFA further into
| question.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| What legal system doesn't have this feature? Seriously
| where are you from that this isn't how it works?
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Yeah, and we're reacting to how crazy it is that Meta's
| competitors are required to divulge internal documents to
| Meta so Meta can make a case that they aren't
| anticompetitive.
|
| > It's not that Meta that wants the documents for corporate
| espionage
|
| Yes I'm sure we all trust Meta will behave ethically when
| given private information.
| treis wrote:
| They're not required to divulge documents. They're required
| to respond to the subpoena. An acceptable response is that
| you don't want to divulge because they're confidential or
| the request is too burdensome.
| michaelt wrote:
| I believe the stance of the justice system is that
| Facebook's lawyers will behave ethically with the
| information because it's a professional obligation for
| lawyers.
|
| You and I might see that as a laughable claim -
| unfortunately the justice system is run entirely by
| lawyers.
| musingsole wrote:
| > You and I might see that as a laughable claim
|
| Being disbarred is a very real threat to any lawyer
| putting a roof over their heads. Which is most lawyers.
| petemir wrote:
| But by doing this, they are inadvertently showing that a
| company like SimulaVR _cannot_ compete in this space, as the
| small team in charge of actually doing some work now has to
| devote its time to take care of this.
| josaka wrote:
| Yes, but in practice, this is just an opening offer in a
| negotiation. Parties will typically counter with something
| like: depose me in my home town for no more than x hours, and
| I'll produce what docs I have if you sign a protective order
| that makes produced info attorney's-eyes-only, i.e., business
| people cannot review. Unlikely a court would require more than
| this.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| This is exactly how it would go down. People on this thread
| freaking out have no idea how the legal system works.
| nailer wrote:
| Off topic but their product seems awesome - VR computers
| specifically designed for coding, including displaying small
| text, running Linux, etc. Beats working from a coding laptop:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x293SiEdv4M&t=25s
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Reminds me of Immersed[1]. Which is an amazing concept but
| horrible on the Oculus. Literally makes me sick - and screen
| resolution/clarity leaves a lot to be desired if you're already
| at 4k/144hz.
|
| I can't wait until someone cracks the code on this and makes it
| a reality.
|
| 1: https://medium.com/immersedteam/working-from-
| orbit-39bf95a6d...
| kanetw wrote:
| Yeah, Immersed popped up alongside us. A big reason of why we
| went the hardware route (as an originally pure software
| product) was that the existing hardware was not good enough.
|
| Having worked with the prototype headset, I can fairly
| confidently say that at least the picture quality is now good
| enough (with our optical train/displays)
| kanetw wrote:
| It's a bit tooting my own horn but when I first put on the
| prototype it was really satisfying. Incredibly crisp.
| whateveracct wrote:
| It really is - and on the topic of "competition"..
|
| Meta is not a competitor to Simula and honestly never will be
| because they will never give you Freedom to run Linux and hack
| to your heart's content.
|
| But Simula is a competitor to Meta in that their existence
| gives people like me a serious (non-toy) VR headset they'd
| actually buy. So the reason Meta has competition from Simula is
| because they're terrible from a consumer-privacy and -respect
| perspective.
| MikusR wrote:
| Quest runs Android and Android run on Linux.
| whateveracct wrote:
| That's only technically correct. I'd say given the words I
| said around "Linux," your response is pedantic at best.
|
| Android is in no way what I want. And is it Open and Free?
| Can I do whatever I want with it? Can I install NixOS
| Mobile? Jailbreaking doesn't count since we are talking
| about official product offerings.
|
| If I can't run my own software from source + make my device
| completely decoupled from Meta, it isn't a competitor of
| Simula to me.
| MikusR wrote:
| https://developer.oculus.com/blog/unlocking-oculus-go/
| whateveracct wrote:
| So - their discontinued model?
| jphsnsir wrote:
| Ordered a founders edition many months ago. I hope to use it one
| day and add it to my nixos config. If not it'll help the open
| source community. One thing is certain, the VR/AR I want to use
| won't come from big tech.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| This is exactly the type of thing that made me lose All faith in
| the US Justice System and consider defecting.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| What, why? This is normal legal process. I hate Meta plenty,
| check my comment history, but this isn't an unusual or corrupt
| thing.
| unknownaccount wrote:
| Being forced to divulge your trade secrets to a competitor
| company's legal team + cover the cost of travel to court in a
| far away state + denial of income- under circumstances in
| which you've done nothing wrong -might be "normal legal
| process" but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Just one of
| many ways in which a small business in USA can get wreaked by
| the legal system over the most frivolous of things.
| thom_ wrote:
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| As Facebook slowly dies we will see more and more thrashing from
| the monster.
| incomingpain wrote:
| If I were simulaVR, I would make this very painful to meta.
|
| You would put together business plans that literally say no other
| vendor can compete against meta. Basically confirm the anti-
| competition. That even that subpeona is anticompetive and an
| attempt to further crush them.
|
| Malicious compliance the entire way.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| I think the subpoena is mostly for existing records and novel
| records of existing plans. IANAL, but I think if you were to
| create novel documents that were most certainly less than
| honest for the purpose of swaying the case, there could be
| legal consequences for you.
|
| Courts aren't stupid - if it becomes apparent that you are
| attempting to maliciously comply, they can still get you based
| on your apparent intent.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, don't go creating bullshit in response, but anyone who
| is remotely connected to anything Meta, Google, Apple are
| involved in should have in their documents details on why
| they won't be competing with the big names.
| incomingpain wrote:
| Obviously playing with very hot fire.
|
| Simula has to have a business plan. Has to list their
| competitors like HTC and Meta who are anticompetitively
| working together on a virtual world. viveverse is literally
| called metaverse; technically i don't know if it's literally
| the same virtual world.
|
| You can then look at Lenovo, Microsoft, Valve and Google
| whose VR stuff died. Your assumption is they cant compete
| against them.
|
| Then you explain your business plan of finding a wierd open
| source niche. Entirely because competing against meta is
| impossible.
|
| I'm not saying fabricating evidence or like try to get your
| accounts banned off facebook to make it look like they are
| trying to crush you. You simply make the reasonable argument
| and business case a unresourced startup can't compete against
| a 350billion $ org with an army of devs.
|
| Meta's fault for bothering you. Then again you're literally
| holding a paper vial of anthrax on this one if you do it.
| #YOLO
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Isn't that what they already did with this statement? Quoting
| last paragraph subtitle "We're don't view ourselves in
| competition with Meta" is exactly that. Therefore the FTC can
| take that and prove FB is a monopoly, or whatever FTC end-game
| is.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| That sounds like a bold faced lie to me. To quote the
| article:
|
| >Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who
| want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose
| productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs and
| laptops. So our real competition is laptops & PCs, not other
| gaming headsets.
|
| Everything Meta has been releasing publicly about their VR
| Headset plans make it blatantly clear that it is not only
| targeting gaming.
| incomingpain wrote:
| That's what prompted my idea. Though as the other comments
| said, playing with fire.
| bedast wrote:
| Judges HATE malicious compliance.
|
| Best case is Simula can file an injunction along the lines of
| not being a competitor or not having any relevance and wishing
| to keep their trade secrets...secret.
|
| Otherwise, comply with only existing documentation. For
| example, if they requested fine-grained details on metrics that
| don't exist, then the correct response to that is "doesn't
| exist".
| adwi wrote:
| I know this story won't make headline news but boy, Meta sure
| seem to be going out of their way to shred every last bit of
| goodwill they have with, well, everyone?
| _HMCB_ wrote:
| I'd tell FB where to go.
| sushiburps wrote:
| The irony of an antitrust lawsuit hurting smaller competitors.
| micimize wrote:
| I don't begrudge them their annoyance (or click-through
| harvesting) but there is a straightforward legal process for
| objecting to and quashing a subpoena. Seems like it might apply
| here, at least in part: https://www.klgates.com/Litigation-
| Minute-Responding-to-Thir...
|
| Also RE some speculation in this thread, it seems very unlikely
| to me that Meta's legal team was looking to get some free market
| research, but it is interesting to consider.
| thesausageking wrote:
| If you never been through discovery, it can seem that way, but
| nothing is straightforward or cheap about responding to a
| subpoena in a high profile case with a $500B company.
|
| Samsung, Nintendo, and the other parties listed likely will
| spent $1-2m on these subpoenas. It likely involves thousands
| and thousands of messages and documents. A lot of back and
| forth with lawyers ("Each of these 12 employees exported
| everything with the word 'roadmap' in their email? what about
| Sandy's personal phone; I see a reference to an SMS
| elsewhere"), IP council to redact things, and then prep and
| support for the deposition.
|
| SimulaVR is a tiny startup. It very well could kill them.
| micimize wrote:
| yeesh - one would hope that would fall under "undue burden or
| expense" but yeah I guess you never know how this kinda thing
| plays out until you've been through the ringer (like
| everything). Thinking again, I can't believe I included the
| descriptor "straightforward"
| raydiatian wrote:
| That commercial is hilarious. Everybody is clearly mocking this
| dipshit for wearing a VR headset in public.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| This blog post doesn't explain what they are actually going to do
| about this. It's just a (non-legal) complaint about the fact they
| got a subpoena, which is honestly a pretty normal and
| uncontroversial thing. It might be bad for Meta to request this
| info, but if so, the right thing to do is get a lawyer, submit a
| motion to quash, and then go after Meta for costs through legal
| process.
|
| What is SimulaVR actually going to do to respond to this? _Do_
| they intend to respond? Who 's representing them? I can't imagine
| a lawyer recommended writing this blog post.
|
| The "we can't afford this" argument doesn't hold water. Lawyers
| are expensive but this is not a complicated thing SimulaVR is
| being asked to do, and they're likely to get their costs back
| from the court if they ask.
| pid_0 wrote:
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| _You need to get a lawyer._
|
| I am not a lawyer, but I annoy them daily.
|
| You can decide not to appear, but you can be held in contempt.
| Note that your subpoena comes from the court, not Meta.
|
| You need to get the lawyer to negotiate down what to provide. The
| first salvo is always everything, including the kitchen sink.
|
| You need a lawyer to know to whom to talk to. You need to get the
| lawyer to negotiate the expenses associated with this.
|
| Read Rule 45 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_45)
| much of what you describe (distance, financial burden) are
| addressed there.
|
| Did I mention, you need a lawyer?
| awinter-py wrote:
| rule 45 allows attorneys of record in a case to issue subpoenas
| without leave of the court, I think
|
| subpoena may not 'come from the court'
|
| per this https://media.goldbergsegalla.com/uploads/sll-
| mpl_forthedefe...
|
| (but this doesn't change your point about risk of contempt + it
| being a good idea to respond)
| kanetw wrote:
| First thing we did was get a lawyer.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Thank you. It did not come across in your blog post.
|
| May your lawyer be cheap, vicious, despicable, and never-
| losing.
| MikusR wrote:
| And they suggested that you write a blog post?
| kanetw wrote:
| We ran it past them and they ok'd it. We as a company are
| fundamentally very open. It is quite literally a core facet
| of our business, and that includes not just the technical
| parts.
|
| Of course there's stuff that's internal, but something
| that's literally a matter of public record isn't it.
| robg wrote:
| The problem here is the FTC trying to regulate a nascent industry
| by fiat. The startup is caught up in the silliness of trying to
| define competition in an area of trade that doesn't really exist
| yet. Exactly when the FTC should go find something better to do,
| like health claims in supplements.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Exactly when the FTC should go find something better to do,
| like health claims in supplements.
|
| That's FDA.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| TIL how a subpoena can work. I had no idea.
| awinter-py wrote:
| ianal but if I were drafting simula's motion to quash, I would
| mention that the categories of information fb wants are
| confidential or trade secrets under most employment agreements,
| including probably fb's
|
| and that rule 45 requires the court to quash if the subpoena is
| for 'privileged or other protected matter'
|
| and if you can prove undue burden you can sanction their firm (in
| theory at least)
|
| (could also just refresh the northern district's efile until big
| G responds, then steal theirs)
| traverseda wrote:
| Well I am not a lawyer, and if I was a lawyer I wouldn't be a
| lawyer in that country, but my understanding is that SimularVR is
| under no obligation to create any new documents or gather any
| _new_ information. So for example the answer to "Fine-grained
| usage statistics of our software" can legitimately be "we don't
| have any". If I was SimulaVR I would gather all documents that
| _currently exist_ , and be very careful about creating any new
| documents regarding any of this before consulting with a lawyer.
| I imagine that creating new documents in answer to this might
| create further obligations, but I really don't know.
|
| Of course I'm not a lawyer and don't really know what I'm talking
| about, and this is not legal advice.
| dsign wrote:
| This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that
| exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire
| competing organization to do market research for Meta. It is
| clever and evil, and nothing anybody says after this will make me
| think that Meta is not anti-competitive nor that they have an
| once of ethics. As a consumer, I doubt I will ever again consider
| their VR products; I rather give my money to Satan, or even
| Google.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > nor that they have an once of ethics
|
| It still find it odd that people think large corporations
| actively engage in ethics in any other capacity than for PR and
| manipulating public opinion. I have never in my life seen
| anything other than the smallest of private companies make a
| decision based on "ethical" reasons where there was a competing
| financial reason. Can you recall, over your entire career,
| where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than
| purely PR or legal) reasons? I have witness several companies
| where bringing up ethical concerns about company behavior
| ultimately leads to termination.
|
| The most obvious example of this non-ethical nature of
| corporations is record companies bringing up the "unethical"
| behavior of piracy. It's not like the heads of these companies
| had a big ethics meeting and decided "hey piracy is not
| ethical, we need to fight it!" or otherwise they would have
| also been like "and... next on the agenda is the unethical
| profiting of black musicians in the 50s and 60s, we should
| start cutting some checks now since that was clearly wrong."
|
| Ethics is a social construction, created by participants in a
| society, as a way of organizing and regulating behavior. Ethics
| is subtle, flexible and perpetually evolving. We as a
| collective can develop and evolve our ethics overtime, but the
| essential part is that everyone is playing the same game.
|
| Corporations are not playing the game at all, "ethics" from the
| view of a corporate entity is just another tool they can use to
| manipulate public opinion, but they don't participate in the
| ethics game.
|
| The problem is that they participating in society in an
| asymmetric way. They want everyone else to adhere to an ethical
| system when interacting with them, but consider themself
| completely outside the realm of ethics.
|
| When normal humans decide that they do not want to participate
| in the ethics game there are consequences ranging from mild
| chastisement to complete estrangement from society depending on
| the degree one individual refuses to participate in the ethical
| system of the larger society.
|
| This is not to say corporations are _evil_ , but that are
| absolutely _amoral_ in that they are not participating the
| moral and ethical game. Bears are amoral in the same way. We
| don 't expect bears to make ethical decisions, but when they
| habitually violate the ethical code of the humans they interact
| with, they are usually put down as a threat to society.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| > Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product
| decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or
| legal) reasons?
|
| Yes, because I made them.
|
| As a nation built on capitalism, it is those who are able to
| influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden
| and responsibility of the decisions made by those
| corporations. Whether those individuals are held accountable
| or not is irrelevant to the fact that ethics certainly ought
| to be considered for any individual involved who believes
| themselves to be "acting ethically".
|
| I've worked hard in my career to get a seat at the table
| where those decisions are made because I recognize that is a
| place where good can be done, at scale.
|
| We should hold ourselves, and capitalism, to higher
| standards. And for those of us who are leaders, whether that
| is a small start-up or a major conglomerate, we are
| responsible for creating an environment where ethical
| decisions can be made.
| trasz wrote:
| >it is those who are able to influence the decisions of
| corporations that bear the burden and responsibility
|
| This is an interesting idea, and I agree that it would be
| great if it were true, but it's not, and I don't think it's
| ever been. Those who make decisions for corporations don't
| bear any burden; everyone else does.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Parent also conveniently states:
|
| > Whether those individuals are held accountable or not
| is irrelevant
|
| This is actually a perfect example of the point I was
| making. "I want the benefits of participating in an
| ethical system but don't want the consequences".
|
| This is why people claim that corporations behave like
| sociopaths.
|
| A bear (from my example), isn't a sociopath, because it
| doesn't expect moral behavior from you, nor does it
| expect to benefit from moral behavior applied to it. A
| bear is perfectly amoral. A bear may cause you harm, and
| you may harm a bear, you might feel bad you had to kill a
| bear, but the bear will not be concerned either way with
| your ethical system, it simply wants to eat and live.
|
| A sociopath on the other hand takes advantage of moral
| asymmetry, expecting you to treat it like a person when
| you interact with it (for example showing mercy for its
| trespasses), but wanting to be free to act like a bear in
| regards to serving its own ends.
| [deleted]
| JeezusJuiceTPR wrote:
| I don't really know the rules of evidence, but I don't think
| this is coming directly from Meta, nor that they're allowed to
| review these documents themselves. The subpoena has to come
| from the court, and so I imagine it's the court reviewing the
| documents, not Meta. I sure hope that's how it works. I'd love
| for a lawyer to chime in, though.
| jjulius wrote:
| IANAL, but I would imagine that at the very least, Meta's
| lawyers would need to be able to see the documentation so
| that they can adequately prepare their argument/defense.
| cldellow wrote:
| ? It is literally coming from Meta. That's what the subpoena
| and court filings that are screenshotted on that page show.
| Meta sought the subpoena, the court granted it, and now
| Simula has to testify at a deposition where the questions
| will be asked by Meta.
|
| And... it sort of has to work this way? It's not the job of
| the court to do Meta or FTC's advocacy for them.
| greensoap wrote:
| Federal Courts don't usually grant a subpoena. Notably, the
| notice of third-party subpoeonas from this case wasn't even
| filed in the case.
|
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64436614/federal-
| trade-...
|
| Rather a lawyer that is admitted to the case uses his power
| as a representative to serve a subpoena. These are usually
| NOT reviewed by the judge or court first. The person
| receiving a subpoena can ask the court to quash the
| subpoena (basically void or modify the subpoena) if they
| believe the subpoena is inappropriate, unduly burdensome,
| or whatever else.
| Animats wrote:
| > quash the subpoena
|
| Yes. Obviously they need a lawyer. But they should be
| able to get this quashed. At least narrowed and moved
| somewhere more convenient.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products
|
| I made this mistake and ordered an Oculus earlier this year.
| While I waited for it to arrive, I setup a facebook/meta
| account since that is a requirement. Before the headset
| arrived, Meta had flagged my account as fake, and the process
| to prove that I was in fact a real person would not accept my
| cell phone number. There was nothing else I could do to prove I
| was real. So, fake me returned the headset when it arrived, and
| then fake me felt a sense of relief in the giant bullet I had
| just dodged.
| benreesman wrote:
| As modern capitalism goes, Meta is not on the low end of the
| scale WRT whatever we're calling _ethical_ in a system that has
| legal penalties for leaving money on the table.
|
| It's a ruthless, profit-drive, shareholder-owned, S&P
| 500-dominating company like all the rest, so you get all of
| that into the mix. It's not a particularly flattering group to
| be in if you're big into modern northern european social-good
| democracy.
|
| But the idea that Meta is like, worse than the sovereign wealth
| fund in Riyadh that YC routinely connects founders with, or
| worse than Exxon, or worse than the pharma cartels, or? I could
| go on.
|
| That's just silly now, come on.
| bobse wrote:
| It's easy. Never give money to Americans.
| moomin wrote:
| It's definitely a heel move. I also fail to see how a small
| unprofitable firm (like most startups) is evidence of
| competition.
| jamiequint wrote:
| WhatsApp was a small unprofitable firm before they got bought
| for $18bn
| moomin wrote:
| Unprofitable, maybe.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| This is a subpoena from a legal team, NOT a court. You are free
| to write "we don't know" for much of the questions or even
| write "too burdensome to answer". Such subpoenas have little
| teeth.
|
| Hire a lawyer for a few hours to confirm what I say since I'm
| some random internet guy.
| M4v3R wrote:
| From the article:
|
| We've also been commanded to drop everything we're doing and
| go tesify on these matters _in person_, thousands of miles
| away from us, by the stated deadline :|
|
| So it's not just a matter of writing "we don't know". They
| have to produce a lot of material and then travel 1000's of
| miles to show up in the court in person.
| dangrossman wrote:
| I was once subpoenaed by the state of New York. It was
| worded similarly, asking for a bunch of information and my
| personal appearance. I have never lived or worked in New
| York, and at the time was just a broke college student, so
| taking time off school to fly there would be more than an
| inconvenience. The information they sought was related to a
| fraud case, and their fraudster had bought something from
| one of my websites in the past. After I actually talked to
| the investigators over email, they never actually expected
| me to travel to New York, they were just looking for dates
| and IP addresses relating to these sales, which I emailed
| and my participation in their investigation was over. They
| didn't actually want me to go to New York, that was just
| boilerplate.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| These specific people are being compelled to do that or the
| company is being compelled to show up in person? Those are
| wildly different demands. I find it hard to believe that
| specific productive employees of the company are being
| compelled to show up in court rather just some hired legal
| representatives of the company.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Right, but hiring a legal representative is going to be
| very expensive for a small organization.
|
| It's not just the few hours they'll be testifying, or
| giving deposition. A reasonable corporate representative
| is going to need to do quite a bit of prep work and
| review of relevant materials. So, that's both a legal
| cost, and a productivity cost for whoever is collecting
| those documents and briefing the corporate
| representative.
|
| "Just some hired legal representatives" hides quite a bit
| of cost.
| kanetw wrote:
| Yep. It's easily going to be in the 5 digits.
| jijji wrote:
| you can call an attorney and pay an hourly fee usually
| between 100 - 400/hr to talk with an attorney about your
| case or pay a retainer fee for 10 hours... attorneys that
| throw out 5 digit numbers when asked for a price are rip
| offs
| JamesianP wrote:
| Often I've gotten the initial consultation/advice for
| free on how to do it yourself. The point of lawyer is
| protecting you when you are in danger, and in my
| experience they're happy to tell you that you don't need
| a lawyer here, and give some general tips on the process.
| crmd wrote:
| When I read the pompous first sentence of a US subpoena
| "COMMANDING" the recipient to do something, I like to think
| of it as a direct order from Vigo the Carpathian[0]
|
| [0] https://gfycat.com/forthrightredfurseal
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You're missing the point. The source of the subpoena is
| important. Subpoenas from lawyers are not something you
| have to answer completely. They have no teeth. They are not
| from a court of law.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| This shows that SimulaVR is run by a bunch of children.
| Every subpoena says this, but you work with the attorneys
| to figure out the time and manner that works best for the
| deposition. I routinely flew thousands of miles to do
| depositions in places that worked best for the deposed.
|
| And complaining about how the subpoena's asking for tons of
| documents. Again, every subpoena does this; you have to
| negotiate with the attorneys on the other side to figure
| out what they actually want. If SimulaVR was suing Meta,
| then yeah, Meta will play hardball. But they're a third-
| party here - chances are, attorneys for Meta are looking
| for very specific things (namely, economics to support
| Meta's arguments about the VR market) and SimulaVR will be
| able to negotiate a way to provide that info without
| turning their company inside and out.
|
| And if you are asking WHY SimulaVR should be required to
| provide ANY info at all... well, that's the American legal
| system. Courts and parties have broad power to obtain
| evidence from third parties.
|
| Basically, SimulaVR needs to grow up and hire lawyers to
| handle this.
| caslon wrote:
| Simula isn't even an American company.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| I'm not typically one to point at the HN guidelines, but
| you could have made your points and been informative
| without the insults. It's not helping anything and
| leading to otherwise unnecessary defensive back-and-
| forths.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| So what if they don't have the funds? What if they have
| only so much for this but then have to close the business
| down because of it? It's a small startup.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| You. Work. With. The. Attorneys.
|
| Why is this so hard to grasp. This subpoena is to get
| certain market information. SimulaVR can negotiate with
| Meta to provide the information in a way that's not super
| burdensome for them. I did this all the time when I was a
| lawyer.
|
| SimulaVR is a FRIENDLY WITNESS for Meta, since they can
| presumably provide evidence that Meta operates in a
| competitive VR market. This means Meta's lawyers will be
| very accommodating to get the info they need.
|
| And yeah guess what, you need to hire lawyers from time
| to time when you run a business. Just like you need to
| hire accountants. It sucks but that's how things are.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| Lol, you mean trusting Meta's people? That's insane.
|
| All the accounting you need to do at the beginning of
| your business can be done by yourself, or very cheaply.
| Fighting Meta's claim to your business secrets is not
| going to be cheap.
| st3fan wrote:
| Haha friendly witness. Please hand over your current and
| future business plans over. What could possibly go wrong.
| Does nobody here see how that could backfire with Meta
| having such insight on your business?
| [deleted]
| jonas21 wrote:
| Judging by the responses in this thread, it seems like
| many folks on HN have never worked with an attorney
| before (which isn't too surprising).
|
| Do you have any advice on how to find a competent
| attorney with reasonable fees who can do the specific
| work that you need done? The one time I had to do this
| for my business on short notice, I used Yelp and Google,
| and it was somewhat disastrous. I think it would be
| really helpful for me, and a lot of other folks, to know
| the right way to do this.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| Unfortunately I think word of mouth is the best way to
| find good attorneys. Ask people who run similar
| businesses as you who they use? If there's a chamber of
| commerce in your city or town, you could ask them for
| references.
| gbasp wrote:
| sroussey wrote:
| You charge them time and materials, and cap it. Or ignore
| it. Best to just write back that they are too small, no
| revenue, no funding.
|
| Ignore the tone of these things. Legal is commanded to
| write in this manner.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| So what if they are children? Fuck children?
|
| They received a letter that looks important and official
| to them, and looks to them like something they have to
| comply with.
|
| Are you giving legal advice to ignore letters from
| lawyers?
| wtetzner wrote:
| > Are you giving legal advice to ignore letters from
| lawyers?
|
| The only advice I saw them give was to hire lawyers to
| help them deal with it.
| [deleted]
| jolmg wrote:
| > This shows that SimulaVR is run by a bunch of children
| [...] SimulaVR needs to grow up and hire lawyers to
| handle this.
|
| It wasn't SimulaVR who responded to you, so why respond
| by insulting SimulaVR for the comment of someone else?
| They've already got legal counsel:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111249
|
| All SimulaVR did in their blog post is state the facts.
| They haven't refuted the point you said, and may be
| already looking into that.
| [deleted]
| kordlessagain wrote:
| This. I will never give money to Meta for anything.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| _Eyeroll_. Meta did nothing wrong here. This isn 't them going
| after their competition; they're the _defendant_ in this
| lawsuit. As the article says:
|
| > In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this
| fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't
| behaving "anti-competitively". So naturally, one of the primary
| (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to
| subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which
| might help them in court
|
| To the extent that you have a problem with the subpoena, blame
| the judge who authorized it, or perhaps the legal system that
| makes such subpoenas possible. Meta is not the aggressor here.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > Meta did nothing wrong here
|
| Doesn't this depend on whether Meta is actually guilty of
| what the FTC is accusing them of? If they are, then clearly
| the wrong thing they did was behave anti-competitively.
|
| If they are guilty of that, then it is fair to blame them for
| being dragged into their defense. While everyone has the
| right to defend themselves, it is fair to be upset at having
| to be called in the defense of someone who broke the law.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Obviously _if_ the court rules they acted anti-
| competitively then yeah that would count as "doing
| something wrong", but I don't think it makes sense to call
| their legal defense itself evil. As you said, Meta has a
| right to defend itself in court, just like anyone.
| giobox wrote:
| I'm not defending Meta, but what constitutes anti-
| competitive behaviour is often hard to define and requires
| a court process to ultimately decide - it's not a binary
| state one can easily recognize having entered or exited. If
| it was, many kinds of legal issue wouldn't need nearly as
| much court time.
|
| Until a Court process says otherwise, Meta have done
| nothing wrong here.
| danaris wrote:
| Personally, I don't think there's _any_ possible doubt
| that Meta /Facebook has behaved anti-competitively in a
| variety of ways over the years; the fact that they
| haven't been taken to task for this is largely because of
| the Chicago doctrine's absurd principle that such things
| only matter if they increase prices for consumers.
| midislack wrote:
| Stealing secret plans from companies under the guise of being
| the POOR VICTIM!
| HillRat wrote:
| Facebook is very much the aggressor -- in response to the FTC
| suit, their immediate response was to try and use the courts
| to strong-arm hundreds of competitors into giving up massive
| troves of highly sensitive commercial secrets without any
| kind of formal protection, such as limiting document review
| to FB's outside counsel. It's ridiculous, it's abusive, it's
| overbroad, and it's transparently an effort to burden
| Facebook's competitors while snowing the FTC with massive
| amounts of paper.
| tiahura wrote:
| That's not how litigation works. If SimulaVR wants
| protection, it has to ask for it. SimulaVR has the right to
| ask 1) Meta and 2) the court to limit the scope of the
| subpoena and to set conditions on the review and
| distribution of the production. If Meta agrees to the
| conditions, great, the agreement can either be informal, or
| incorporated into an order for the judge to sign. If Meta
| is opposed, SimulaVR gets to make their case to the judge
| and let him decide scope and protective order details.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| Welcome to the American legal system. Facebook did nothing
| wrong here. When I was an attorney and involved with these
| kinds of subpoenas, we always worked with the third-parties
| to make document production less burdensome for them.
| SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this
| instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| ginko wrote:
| >SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this
| instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
|
| Well then Meta's attorneys should contact SimulaVR
| directly instead of sending them a legal letter.
| jessaustin wrote:
| _Welcome to the American legal system._
|
| This isn't as strong a justification as one might
| imagine. That system sucks in many ways. Recently we
| learned that DoJ routinely take every document held by
| particular targeted law firms, without warrants, and then
| designate "taint teams" of DoJ lawyers who view every
| document and suggest which ones should be seen by
| investigators. [0] The idea is that the taint team will
| forget all the documents they've seen when they later
| investigate other clients of the targeted law firms. Many
| judges have ordered this practice stopped, but DoJ DGAF.
|
| This taint team concept obviously is unconstitutional and
| undermines justice, but ISTM the practice you describe is
| worse. When Meta's lawyers view documentation extracted
| from SimulaVR, they do so _as agents of Meta._ Their
| current stated goal may be to defend Meta in the present
| suit, but there 's no reason to believe that's the only
| goal they'll ever have. Have Meta promised to throw away
| all documents after some of them have been presented to
| the court? Is there some sort of escrow concept that
| allows SimulaVR to trust someone other than Meta's
| lawyers? The danger to SimulaVR is actually _greater_ if
| Meta are telling the truth that they _are_ competitors!
|
| If Meta actually were competitors of SimulaVR, it would
| be easy to show that by hiring an expert to testify that
| "this service and/or product sold by SimulaVR competes
| with this other service and/or product sold by Meta". The
| sort of thing described in TFA has other purposes.
|
| [0] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-justice-department-
| was-dan...
| kanetw wrote:
| We aren't throwing a hissy fit lol. We're just stating
| the facts and are working with our lawyers to resolve
| this.
| jijji wrote:
| why not just respond to their subpoena with one line
| answers....
| kanetw wrote:
| Responding to any legal request without legal counsel is
| a good way to fuck yourself up. There's no "just do x"
| unless you enjoy playing with fire.
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came
| to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
|
| Look, I get that you guys are a small shop but you should
| not be surprised to be asked to provide evidence in an
| antitrust litigation over the VR market. I'm guessing you
| haven't seen a subpoena before - they are all like this,
| and your attorneys will be able to negotiate something
| much less burdensome.
|
| So get off Hacker News and let your lawyers handle it.
| whateveracct wrote:
| hah these sorts of comments definitely smell like there
| are HNers who likes FAANG money and wanna defend their
| patrons
| tarakat wrote:
| > You made a site complaining about the subpoena [..] I'm
| guessing you haven't seen a subpoena before - they are
| all like this
|
| If everyone kept their mouths shut as you suggest, we
| wouldn't know about how rotten the legal system is until
| it was our turn at the gallows.
| jolmg wrote:
| > You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came
| to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
|
| They didn't make a site to complain; it's their blog by
| which they're informing buyers and potential buyers of
| anything that can affect their progress. It also doesn't
| matter who shared on HN. Any HN user with an interest in
| them would have shared something this significant, like I
| was about to.
| kanetw wrote:
| We made our weekly blog post about it (because it's worth
| talking about, IMO) and someone else posted it on HN. It
| blew up and we're responding to comments as necessary.
|
| We're letting our legal counsel handle the actual
| details, the rest is just talking about it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| What would you have had them do instead? Again:
|
| > naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do
| to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its
| competition...to demand documents which might help them in
| court
| midislack wrote:
| They don't have a right to see secret documents other
| people have. We'll see.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| > I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google<
|
| I giggled. When you go from "don't be evil" to this, you know
| you fucked up big time. This has to be the tagline of the
| decade in regards to Google ("Google!, the boss of Satan", hi
| hi hi).
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| Why?
|
| Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free.
| World changing at it's time still helping people around the
| globe.
|
| Their research blog is fantastic and shows what they value.
|
| Google Io focus on people and security and trust.
|
| Google is much further away from evil than plenty of other
| companies.
|
| Did they kill stadia? Yes.
|
| Did actually anyone care? No. Because stadia didn't matter
| anyway.
| lostgame wrote:
| >> 'free'
|
| Don't make us all laugh. It's 'free' because the _user_ is
| the product, not the service.
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| Why the f* would I need to clarify on hn that it's 'free'
| in sense of ad tracking?
|
| We all know what it means. Still doesn't change the fact
| what the value for billion of people is real.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for
| free.
|
| I paid for the phone and they are still collecting my data.
| For me this is not free.
| gpm wrote:
| > I paid for the phone and they are still collecting my
| data.
|
| You paid for the phone, not for the google services.
|
| You're free to use non-google services on android.
| Moreover open street map, and numerous other email
| clients, exist - it's even a practical choice.
|
| > For me this is not free.
|
| No comment on this portion
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| You paid for a phone with Google.
|
| That was your decision. There are other options.
|
| And while you mind, billions are really happy to have a
| very secure and relativity cheap phone.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| We've just gone from "they're not evil" to "okay so maybe
| they are evil but that was your choice, and they're
| cheap" in the span of a single comment.
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| Where?
|
| I don't think Google is evil because they get money
| through ads.
|
| I'm fine with that.
|
| There is also a huge difference on how Google collects,
| stores and analysis your data vs. companies like
| Facebook.
|
| I'm pretty sure Google actually knows we're your data is
| in comparison to Facebook
| arrosenberg wrote:
| How can you determine it is cheap when Google is
| anticompetitively subsidizing the cost with advertising
| and data collection? You could be getting hosed and never
| know it.
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| Because android itself is free but I'm not seeing a lot
| of companies or you taking the time and effort to make an
| ad free Android phone for the same price or cheaper.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| A competitor can't enter the market to compete on price
| because Google subsidizes their product with ads. Thats
| the very picture of predatory, anticompetitive behavior.
| You can't know what the market would be if Android were
| forced to compete fairly.
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| Microsoft did not leave the market because of googles ad
| revenue.
|
| Apple is playing the game without ads as well.
|
| Nokia could have forked android.
|
| Google just continue to care enough.
|
| The other companies could replicate it. The just don't
| mind
| sbarre wrote:
| If you think Google's biggest sin is killing Stadia, you
| stopped paying attention over a decade ago.
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| I'm following well enough.
|
| Have you checked the last Google Io?
|
| They don't hide that they collect data.
|
| Android is still open.
|
| You can't expect Google to just give you a android
| distribution without their stuff for free just because.
|
| You still can use it.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >They don't hide that they collect data.
|
| They have a mode in Chrome called "incognito mode" that,
| to the average person, strongly implies it doesn't
| collect data, yet of course it does.
| tpxl wrote:
| Citation needed.
|
| It says what it does right there when you open it, and
| collecting data _and sending it to google_ would be
| pretty damn weird in incognito mode.
|
| You're not invisible to websites, ISPs, ... and it says
| so right on the page.
| vlunkr wrote:
| "Free"
|
| They're probably largely to blame for setting the precedent
| that Internet services should be free. And of course backed
| by selling user data or unsustainable venture capital
| backed business models.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Personally, I blame this wired article
| https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for
| free. World changing at it's time still helping people
| around the globe.
|
| That's just the fat, juicy worm dangling on the hook just
| waiting for you to take it all in--hook, line, and sinker.
| Bloedcoin wrote:
| I use it without any issues and billions other do to.
|
| I can decide if I'm okay with it or not. You are clearly
| not. I'm.
| version_five wrote:
| > Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for
| free.
|
| Not to belabor a frequently raised discussion topic, but
| "free" as in gratis is not the same as "zero dollars"
|
| And google charges its customers
| mkmk3 wrote:
| I'm not against having Simula foot the bill in preparing
| whatever materials they may need to prepare to aid in the FCC's
| investigation - I think that's a reasonable cost of doing
| business, one that ought to scale with the size of the company,
| no? However, I agree that there may be valuable information
| you'd rather your competitor not have access to at your
| expense. Is there instances of, or analogues in other domains,
| of information relevant to the persecution of one party,
| belonging to another party, being reviewed in confidence by a
| third party? Or failing to find a fair solution in terms of
| that approach, how much can that information be trimmed?
| onepointsixC wrote:
| This seems like a wildly emotional response that is completely
| out of line with what is being asked.
|
| The FTC is suing Meta, and it has a right to get other
| companies to admit that they are in fact competitors to Meta in
| the VR Space. SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming
| that:
|
| "Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who
| want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose
| productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs"
|
| Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming
| VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR
| Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal
| graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
| [deleted]
| lostmsu wrote:
| The latter is a different target market though.
| mlyle wrote:
| > SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:...
|
| > Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the
| gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional
| use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few
| internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the
| space.
|
| Part of the antitrust action is determining the boundaries of
| the market.
|
| If company A has a monopoly in market X, and company B
| competes in related market Y, ... the fact that company A
| intends to enter market Y does not mean company B is
| preventing company A from having a monopoly in market X. (But
| if X and Y are the same market, they are!)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Right, so you can imagine this evidence would be useful to
| Meta if the boundaries were drawn differently than how you
| are imagining.
| mlyle wrote:
| At the same time, you can imagine that SimulaVR wants to
| assert "we are not proof META isn't a monopoly". Further,
| they probably don't want to provide key market
| information that could aid an aggressive monopolist from
| leveraging their way into SimulaVR's space.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Simula may not want to hurt meta (a competitor) when that
| competitor is burning billions in cash to prop up a VR
| market. They may benefit from a growing consumer
| awareness and UX research.
| mkmk3 wrote:
| What they may or may not desire is less relevant in the
| face of what external bodies compel them to do
| midislack wrote:
| Facebook's asking for too much, business plans from over 100
| companies? LOL
| make3 wrote:
| I feel like they should pay SimulaVR's lawyer fees though.
| Why would SimulaVR be forced to spend resources to help Meta
| prove it's not a monopoly
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| This. Further, if any other company or person can be
| compelled to give up their private data against their will,
| and perform actions and expend resources and rob from their
| actual jobs they need to be doing, then it for damned sure
| shouldn't be in service to anyone who they have no
| relationship with. The court should be the only ones able
| to do that, and the government should have to pay for it
| (meaning you and I of course, which means they should only
| do it if there is some reason that benefits us all) and any
| private data strictly controlled and only handled managed
| by the court or some agreed 3rd party.
|
| It makes no sense at all that any company can use another
| to defend itself like that.
|
| As far as I can see Meta should hire researchers to
| assemble data about the state of the market from public
| data.
|
| Or even further, really whoever is charging Meta should
| have to bear that burden of collecting that data to prove
| it.
|
| If corporations are people then they are innocent until
| _proven_ guilty. If corporations are not people then GREAT!
| We have a lot of old cases I would love to see unwound that
| hinged on that ridiculous idea. But they can 't be both at
| different times, and still claim to have a system that has
| any integrity and that we should respect.
| bredren wrote:
| It is a thing to bill US Federal LE for data retrieval
| related to subpoenas and investigations.
|
| It does seem like if there are collateral subpoenas from
| FTC action, the feds should foot the bill.
| enjoylife wrote:
| Not sure if "wildly emotional" is fair to them either.
|
| > In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this
| fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't
| behaving "anti-competitively".
|
| But I agree, the post does seem similar to an individual
| trying to get attention for their cause, ie. 'Google locked
| me out...'. To me the tone is probably trying to help sell
| their narrative of them being this small thing not worth
| subpoenaing.
| Entinel wrote:
| These types of things are incredibly silly. During the Epic vs
| Apple charade, Apple subpoenaed Steam for financial records as
| well which the judge forced Steam to comply with. The fact that a
| situation completely unrelated to me can force me to hand over
| what I would consider business secrets is a bit absurd.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Exposing those "business secrets" still has value, even to the
| general public. However, Apple should also have been forced to
| reveal their financial records.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Never forget, the company is called Facebook. The Meta rebrand
| was a desperate ploy to sidestep negative attention surrounding
| ongoing litigation and to bolster hope in the dying company as
| they try to pivot toward VR.
| mlatu wrote:
| disgusting behaviour from meta, as is tradition.
| endominus wrote:
| From their post, it appears that Simula don't intend to comply
| with the subpoena. IANAL. Does receipt of these documents carry
| an obligation to provide the documents and deposition requested?
| Does this open them to later legal action if they refuse? It
| seems like a strange thing for a corporation to be able to demand
| that other companies hand over stuff like this, no matter the
| circumstance.
| ajross wrote:
| A subpoena is a court order (and the service requirement
| constitutes legal proof that it was delivered). Refusal to
| comply is contempt, which can be punished as a crime. No, you
| don't get to ignore a subpoena.
|
| In this particular case it looks like they're just being asked
| to testify about their product in an unrelated case. They
| aren't being sued.
|
| Call your lawyer first and do what they say. Most likely you
| can arrange a deposition more convenient to your schedule and
| location.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Just want to clarify: we're not ignoring this subpoena and
| intend to comply with the law. We're in contact with a lawyer
| and are discussing our options with them.
| bombcar wrote:
| Who pays for all the costs associated with this? Can you
| abuse the legal system to drive a company into bankruptcy by
| repeatedly subpoenaing them?
| ajross wrote:
| People are really (really) misinterpreting this. The OP
| isn't being sued, they aren't being attacked as a
| competitor to Meta. (In fact the obvious guess here was
| that they're being asked to testify in this antitrust case
| to the fact that their product is successful!)
|
| A subpoena is just a demand for testimony. The court wants
| to "know what you know" so it can make a better decision.
| Testimony before courts of law is part of your civic duty
| as an inhabitant of a nation under the rule of law. Yes, it
| has costs. You have to bear them for the same reason you
| need to pay your taxes, because a civilization without
| courts isn't one we want to live in.
| bombcar wrote:
| Costs don't have anything to do with being sued or not. A
| subpoena to a person is relatively easy to respond to
| (unless you need a lawyer to help you negotiate the fifth
| amendment for reasons), but this will cost time and
| money, both things that we all know startups have in vast
| quantities.
|
| If the answer is not Meta pays, then why isn't it?
| ajross wrote:
| I told you: The recipient pays as part of their civic
| duty. If you want protection under the law for your own
| grievances, you need to be prepared to assist the court
| in the adjudication of the grievances of others.
|
| And the practical reason is that _poor people have the
| right to petition courts for redress of grievances too_.
| You 're upset because Zuckerberg happens to be rich, so
| this seems unfair. But what if the startup had to sue
| someone and needed testimony from someone else to prove
| their case? You think they should have to pay just to get
| facts before the court?
| bombcar wrote:
| At some point, yes, otherwise it can and will be abused,
| just like patent lawsuits already are.
|
| There are cases of this already happening in the case of
| poor people, otherwise vexatious litigants wouldn't
| exist.
|
| I wonder if the judge even knew that one of the list of
| companies was "small company mctinypants" or just assumed
| all were massive and huge.
| ajross wrote:
| Once more: _it 's just a subpoena_. OP is looking at a
| few thousand dollars of legal fees and maybe a trip to
| wherever the court is. If you're operating a profit-
| seeking company in a legal regime that provides the
| protection that ours does, you simply have to be able to
| bear those costs. If your VC's or angels won't pay it,
| they aren't serious investors.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > People are really (really) misinterpreting this. The OP
| isn't being sued, they aren't being attacked as a
| competitor to Meta.
|
| The only way to misunderstand this is to not have read
| the linked page. HN is not immune from headline-only
| outrage. The first paragraph literally ends with:
|
| > ... in relation to the government's recent injunction
| against their acquisition of a VR fitness company.
| dugmartin wrote:
| There are anti-SLAPP laws but those are for more for
| protecting freedom of speech:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_pub
| l...
|
| but you can be labeled a "vexatious litigant" which causes
| you to be radioactive for representation (nobody wants to
| disbarred):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation
|
| (IANAL but I enjoy watching them on TV)
| bombcar wrote:
| From what I understand vexatious litigant is a _really,
| really high_ bar to cross, and any remotely competent
| lawyer should be able to prevent you from crossing it.
| pyb wrote:
| Nowhere does it say that they don't intend to comply.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Just to clarify: we're seeking legal counsel and intend to
| comply with the law.
|
| Many other larger companies have fought these subpoenas (Snap,
| etc) and, as far as we can tell, still had to hand over items.
| aliqot wrote:
| Time to get well-versed in malicious compliance.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| A game in which a small startup can only choose among
| different bad endings
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Malicious compliance is a good way to get thrown in
| contempt. Courts aren't stupid.
| endominus wrote:
| Apologies, I apparently read too much into your statement
| about difficulty of hiring a legal defense and your "hope
| [that] they leave us alone." Good luck and I hope this
| doesn't take the wind out of your sails too much.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| If that's true, it sounds like companies have been
| weaponizing the legal system to get access to proprietary
| information from their competitors. Surely that has got to be
| illegal somehow?
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| The court decides whether a subpoena should be upheld or
| not. If the judge has signed off on this one, then it's all
| legit. Failing to comply would be contempt of court.
| Algent wrote:
| I'll never understand how US court system basically allow
| you to randomly force anyone unrelated to a case into it
| and suffer the legal cost. It make it so easy to
| weaponize any case to your advantage.
| bombcar wrote:
| Like many things in the world, it all only works because
| the vast majority of people aren't assholes.
|
| As it gets more and more weaponized the slow arm of the
| law will move to prevent it.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| What if a ruling requires information held by someone
| else? Should the case just be dismissed because of lack
| of evidence? Having a functional justice system is
| probably worth some snags.
|
| The legal cost aspect is unfortunate. However, as others
| have mentioned, the court probably doesn't require the
| assembly of new documents, but rather submission of
| existing ones. So while there is a cost, it's not
| devastating.
|
| The interesting question is whether or not this specific
| subpoena has real merit, or if the court was played by
| Meta.
| [deleted]
| moron4hire wrote:
| I know it's not helpful at this point, but you really should
| have had a relationship with a lawyer already. But now is the
| next best time. This is just the first time you're running
| into issues. As you grow, you're almost guaranteed to hit
| more. You'd also be smart to have a lawyer available to
| review all of your intellectual property, terms of service,
| privacy policies, etc.
|
| I'm just a solo punter myself, but having my legal counsel
| already setup, knowing that I can call them at any time,
| rather than having to scramble to find someone in the moment
| a problem happens, gives me a lot of peace of mind.
|
| Given how you're positioned as an Open Source company, maybe
| the Electronic Frontier Foundation can help you find someone
| good.
| kanetw wrote:
| We already have standing legal counsel. George made it
| sound like we're just now seeking a lawyer, but we already
| reviewed our policies etc in the past.
| extropy wrote:
| The subpoena is issued by a judge for a pending case, you can
| either fight it by submitting an opposing motion or be held in
| contempt of court which in this case is pretty much a loss.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| Just stumbled upon this article about Meta getting a 3rd party
| Instagram client removed.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33108032
|
| Wondering if it's just a coincidence that Meta is taking all
| these measures now.
| cwkoss wrote:
| SimulaVR should try to explain to the courts how the subpoena
| itself is having an anticompetitive effect.
| legohead wrote:
| Not exactly on top but in the SimulaVR video linked in the
| article there is a HN easter egg [1].
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/x293SiEdv4M?t=55
| m00x wrote:
| Can't wait for armchair lawyers making wild accusations on things
| they don't understand in these comments
| benreesman wrote:
| Maybe I've just been on a too-long coding stretch, but speaking
| for myself, it's just really unsavory to read so much
| "red/blue"-style sloganism around the big tech companies.
| Obviously I'm biased because I worked for one, and so I saw up
| close the process that produces the decisions that seem to
| routinely generate comment threads with people comparing
| Google/FB/MSFT/etc. to e.g. "Satan".
|
| It's just not that simple folks: and a hallmark of why this forum
| is great is that we tackle "not that simple" with a relentless
| curiosity rather than 1-bit generalizations.
|
| I routinely whack these megacorps for their shady dealings. But
| this "Marg bar Amrika" shit is an unflattering look for such a
| thoughtful community and it ignores that huge parts of this
| community are a direct personal object of very nasty remarks made
| "in general" on a fairly daily basis.
|
| People are quite pleased to enjoy the corporate funding of all
| the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the
| megacorps: try saying something bad about Kubernetes if you don't
| believe me.
|
| It's not a 1-bit thing, and Hacker News is Hacker News because
| when people (and I've been that guy) throw rocks, we demand
| better.
| defterGoose wrote:
| I'm sorry you don't like our tone.
| benreesman wrote:
| Hey, I've been around here a long time and I mouth off more
| often than most: no moral judgements from me.
|
| But yeah, it's a pretty gritty tone and at times it tends to
| blur a bit with the complaints about the interviews being too
| hard and the pay being too high, which isn't an awesome vibe.
|
| I'm the last person to judge someone for shooting off, I get
| heated myself, but I try to be honest about what exactly the
| pebble in my shoe is.
| danra wrote:
| > corporate funding of all the open-source projects that
| wouldn't exist without the megacorps
|
| This is a fallacy: It's possible comparable open source
| contributions could have been made without the graces of the
| corporates.
|
| For example: The giants tend to buy out their competition
| early, so how could it mature enough to be able to contribute
| comparably, or possibly better, to open source?
|
| IMHO the open source contributions of these companies are a
| form of tech-washing, regardless of the honest and best
| intentions of their employees.
| benreesman wrote:
| Sidebar: I don't know what "tech-washing" means. When I see
| that a company is laundering some bias or some social
| advantage through a machine learning model I just call it
| money laundering, because the inputs and outputs are both
| money and I think we've coined enough new victimhood words
| per year every year for many years.
|
| If a company is profiting off it's "open-source"
| contributions, getting out more than it's putting in, then
| it's washing money through GitHub I guess. That's fair.
|
| But "tech-washing" has this implication that any computer
| hacker is in a bad way, which is just silly: back when we had
| to go to the office the freeway overpasses we drove on had
| tent encampments under them.
|
| Take that up with the Ayn Rand idiots who are not uncommon in
| these parts.
| danra wrote:
| By "techwashing" I mean using some of the money a company
| makes in its main business (which in the case of Meta and
| some other corporates has a bad impact on society) to make
| a positive technical contribution to the public , thus
| helping existing and prospective employees work there with
| less of a guilty conscience.
|
| Similar, to e.g. a pharmaceutical company raising the price
| of a medicine excessively, but then donating some of the
| money to build a hospital.
|
| It's just that in the case of tech companies, the
| reputation washing is done via technical contributions.
| benreesman wrote:
| There really isn't any way to confirm or refute that kind of
| argument. What would happen if regulation or social norms or
| whatever prevented big tech companies from existing? I don't
| know and (frankly) you don't either.
|
| I use emacs a dozen plus hours a day, and GNU wouldn't exist
| if RMS hadn't been bullied at the lunch room in the MIT AI
| Lab. Would the world be a better or worse place if he didn't
| have a personal jihad against Symbolics draped in a GNU
| bumper sticker?
|
| I don't know.
| danra wrote:
| Of course, but you don't know either. So your argument that
| these (or equivalent) contributions wouldn't exist without
| the megacorps doesn't hold.
| benreesman wrote:
| It's dramatically easier to prove to a reasonable
| observer that Kubernetes got lifted off the ground by a
| bunch of folks on Google payroll than it is to prove that
| some GNU diehard would have inevitably sold that (silly)
| idea to like a zillion people if only Google didn't beat
| them to it.
|
| I make these sort of observations with a certain regret:
| I was a kid already pushing the limits on a DOS-type
| machine when you could first get Slackware media: the GNU
| userspace has been home since before I ever woke up next
| to a girl.
|
| But it's kinda over now. LLVM vs. GCC is a desperate
| rearguard action, the Rust people have broken the
| mindshare monopoly on shared libraries that was
| insulating `glibc` from it's better (`musl` in almost
| every case is better), old-timers like me are me are a
| bit attached to emacs and bash, but neovim and fish are
| pretty fucking good.
|
| GNU and free software in general are no longer superior
| by virtue of Sun Microsystems leaning too hard into the
| JVM: they've got to work for it now, and they're getting
| their asses kicked.
| weego wrote:
| I'm kind of confused but maybe it's my age. My career ran
| parallel to the birth of open source and it was explicitly
| a reaction against megacorps behavior and practices.
|
| The participation in it part is newer, they were initially
| very hostile (I was warned any number of times aligning
| strategies against oss projects incase it was 'detrimental
| to my career')
| benreesman wrote:
| The thing about reading GNU mailing lists is that they're
| so, I don't know, _intimate_ or something. They 're
| freely available for anyone to read, but community
| members talk so openly on them that you feel like you're
| wire-tapping someone's living room.
|
| I've had enough professional stuff on the line to need to
| pay attention to GNU over the years even though it always
| creeped me out a little bit, and I don't see how anyone
| can read them without concluding that Stallman feeling
| personally slighted was the reason he went on the
| crusade, and the software freedom thing was a reasonably
| comfortable paintjob.
|
| He got picked last for Symbolics, the LMI people didn't
| really want him around either but were getting clobbered
| on defense contracts so they kind of couldn't turn down
| his code (he's a great hacker), and the rest is sort of
| history until Linus comes along right?
| kanetw wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. I distinctly remember open source becoming
| more corporate as the years got by, and corporate
| becoming more open source aligned.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| I agree, and just want to reiterate what was written in the
| article: we genuinely feel no animosity towards Meta and its
| gaming headsets. We don't even feel animosity that they have
| leveraged their economies of scale to provide them very cheaply
| to consumers (something we aren't able to do yet[1]). We just
| disagree with their product vision, and are pursuing our own.
| We also think subpoenaing us for this case seems unreasonable.
|
| [1] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-is-the-simula-one-so-
| expensive...
| tannhauser23 wrote:
| GET OFF THE INTERNET AND HIRE A LAWYER TO HANDLE THIS
|
| You guys want to run a business, well, start acting like
| businessmen. Your company will occasionally get subpoenaed or
| - heaven forbid! - be sued. You got a third-party subpoena
| for documents in a litigation. Guess what, this will happen
| from time to time. Your attorney should be negotiating with
| Meta to figure out what documents/testimony your company will
| provide.
|
| Honestly, your behavior makes me question your maturity.
| Treat this as a learning experience about the reality of the
| American business/legal world. Get a lawyer to handle it and
| shut up about the case.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Presumably they did get a lawyer, but I don't see why they
| should get off the Internet.
|
| If Meta is going to use the legal system to bully tiny
| startups that tangentially compete with them, they might as
| well take a bit of a PR hit for doing it.
| benreesman wrote:
| The parent is already going grey via downvotes, which I
| think is a bit harsh: "hire a lawyer and let them hire PR
| people" is in fact generally good advice.
|
| This thread is 1 part "this isn't the place to litigate
| this" and 2 parts "i've got a beef with big tech", so it's
| unlikely to be germane and therefore the all caps are
| likely to be a bit much.
|
| But it's good advice generally, and that shouldn't be
| downvoted.
| kanetw wrote:
| Hiring a lawyer was the first thing we did. For the rest,
| I'd gladly do this if we had the funds to do so. We
| don't.
|
| Plus, we as a company are (maybe excessively) open. Of
| course we're going to get involved in legal proceedings,
| that's a fact of life. Doesn't mean we won't talk about
| it.
| benreesman wrote:
| In my highly uninformed view, you're thus far in the
| clear near as my uninformed, ignorant ass can tell.
|
| But the GP's advice is still as good as when it was
| printed: for the most part, the under-resourced party is
| courting nothing but trouble by courting public opinion
| litigation.
|
| Do talk to a lawyer, don't say more than you can help on
| the Internet. It's good advice.
| benreesman wrote:
| I suspect that with all such things, that a hacker's opinion
| on the relevant law is probably `/r/ConfidentlyIncorrect`.
|
| I have no opinion on the substantial legal matters at
| question. It's been my observation that the ranking folks at
| Meta in the VR world are as ethical as fiduciary obligation
| permits, but YMMV.
|
| I thank you for your reply and hope that you agree that a
| substantial legal matter which will inevitably be resolved by
| people competent to do so shouldn't become a political
| football in a small but influential forum of people who on
| average know as little about IP law as I do :)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Wether it's reasonable or not is orthogonal to the law.
| It's not because something is legal that it should be a
| thing. I think that whether or not this is legal, the idea
| Meta can access internal documentation from a smaller
| competitor is unreasonable.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Sure, but do we even know what the law _currently_ says
| on this matter? I 've seen a lot of speculation in the
| comments here, but very few facts. Even the original blog
| post seems to have been written before consulting an
| attorney.
|
| For example, does the law have any mechanism for
| compensating SimulaVR for their work on this case? What
| mechanisms exist for appeal? Does Meta have free reign to
| examine the subpoenaed documents, or are there
| restrictions on how that information can be used and who
| can see it?
|
| It just seems to me you ought to know what the law says
| first before arguing it needs to be changed. Chesterton's
| Fence and all that...
| chatterhead wrote:
| Kiro wrote:
| I think you're giving HN too much credit. Threads involving
| certain topics (e.g. big tech) are completely overrun with
| snark and hate that I don't see much of the relentless
| curiosity you're talking about.
| benreesman wrote:
| I know what you're talking about in only the way that someone
| who too often has been part of the problem can :)
|
| But this forum is coming up on two decades and has like one
| or two full-time moderators and somehow remains an island of
| rational discourse in an Internet full of "I'm trained in
| gorilla warfare".
|
| It has it's good days and it's bad days, (just as I do as a
| participant) but I think it's pretty unique.
| duxup wrote:
| Agreed, it has become more and more frequent that HN threads
| are overrun by comments that seem more like they're straight
| out of reddit or even just your local newspaper comment
| section. With all the snark or aggressive dismissive
| pessimism they involve.
|
| It's really sad to see because I love the HN comment section
| for how easily you can say a thing and everyone understands
| there's nuance and lots of angles to address the topic.
|
| I've made posts about an app and the author appears curious
| about the issue (I'm not asking for support, just fun that
| folks are curious). Other people who understand the
| complexity (or just that there is complexity) involved are
| around to explore the issue / ask great questions.
|
| Where other places the response would be the typical cynical
| "Oh that's just because they want you to upgrade!" and so on.
| benreesman wrote:
| In fairness: if you talk shit on Rust here you're in for a
| stomping, but if you praise Rust on `/r/programming` you're
| in for the same stomping by a different crowd ;)
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah it's definitely been making me pull my engagement back
| on HN. It even motivated me to get onto Twitter lol. At some
| point I want to read something a bit more stimulating than
| Tech Nextdoor. I originally came here from Digg and Slashdot
| because I enjoyed talking with other engineers and founders
| in the weeds, but I think the HN crowd has drifted far away
| from that start.
|
| That said the conversation quality here on the non-
| hellthreads is still quite high. I enjoyed the thread on C
| yesterday. It's just that hellthreads and strident comments
| "feel" like they're becoming the norm here and it's harder to
| escape from them.
| nonplus wrote:
| Yeah I have a mental denylist of HN terms at this point
| where I just avoid reading hn comments. In contrast to some
| topics where I can't wait to see discussion, those still
| exist, but these days (I say that like it's new, but it's
| been like this a while) they are fewer.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| unfortunately it looks like many internet threads lose their
| nuance and devolve into black and white, and HN is no exception
| chirau wrote:
| Who pays the legal fees in this case?
| bombcar wrote:
| From what I'm gathering it's on SimulaVR to respond to the
| subpoena, but there's nothing preventing them from having their
| solicitor contact Meta's and arrange for payment to cover
| costs.
| [deleted]
| Forge36 wrote:
| Could this subpoena be used by SimulaVR as evidence of behaving
| anticompetitively by sucking away resources for legal
| proceedings?
| expensive_news wrote:
| I'm surprised to see that Apple isn't on the list of companies
| being subpoenaed. Maybe one advantage of not announcing your
| hotly rumored VR project until it's done and available is that no
| one can subpoena you to ask about it.
| bombcar wrote:
| The iPhone already has "AR" so yeah, I'm surprised they weren't
| on the list. If Meta could argue that Apple is a competitor,
| they'd've already won.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer but: you can get all this stuff done in an hour.
| It's not an exercise in creating new material. You pull all the
| documents you already have on stuff like this, and anything you
| don't have you can say you don't have.
|
| When you appear and are asked, give a short, high level but
| honest description of the industry - it's pretty simple really -
| "it's early stages, there are a number of players, Meta is the
| big dog as it currently stands."
| nickstinemates wrote:
| > you can get all this stuff done in an hour
|
| "I am not a developer, but adding multi tenancy to our product
| is as simple as adding a tenantid to every field in our
| database! Should only take a day or two"
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Not quite the same....
|
| There isn't a state licensing requirement to be a software
| developer. Any person off the street can start writing
| software tomorrow and call themselves a developer. There are
| a good number of jobs where someone needs to know a lot about
| the law, has taken courses or read a lot about it, makes
| decisions on legal matters on a day to day basis, but cannot
| call themselves a lawyer. A couple examples include anyone
| who works on mergers and acquisitions or distressed debt
| investing.
|
| It's similar to "im not a financial advisor" or "this isn't
| financial advice". It can be from someone who knows an awful
| lot about the topic.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| I think making assumptions about operating models, how easy
| something is or isn't to gather, etc. is inappropriate. In
| the same way a random 3rd party may make assumptions about
| you or your life based on these posts. They don't know you
| or anything about you.
|
| Unless you have some unique insight into the situation,
| your assessment of the simplicity of dealing with this
| subpoena is not useful.
|
| Obviously, SimulaVR feels differently or they wouldn't have
| written a blog post about it, wouldn't be in these
| comments, and we wouldn't be talking about it. And they'd
| know how onerous it is, given it affects them and they've
| said it is.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It's a forum, it's basically for speculation. Short of
| being rude, virtually nothing is "inappropriate". Saying
| something is "inappropriate" just suggests one doesn't
| have a reasonable response to the points made.
|
| I've gone through it, from both sides. For a small
| company or individual, it's just not something to panic
| about or assume will consume an enormous amount of time.
| That isn't "unique" insight, lots of people go through
| this, the US is a litigious place. To be clear, _they are
| not on trial_.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Yeah, even if you're willing to defend your competitor you
| will still need to screen your documents to see which needs
| to be sealed and which documents that are under an NDA with
| an unrelated party that can be excluded. An hour is
| definitely too short for this, even if you have 100 lawyers
| (because the bottleneck is you and your knowledgeable
| employees and your lawyers won't likely to know the breadth
| of third-party secrets).
|
| On the other hand, you won't be compensated (fully) after
| this. You may be able to recover your attorneys' fees in some
| cases but your transportation costs won't (it'll be only a
| token fee set by court).
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| They are a small startup.
|
| They won't have hundreds of parties which they have
| documents under NDA and many NDAs have carve-outs for court
| orders anyway. All their docs are likely in Google Drive,
| Box or MSFT's thing, they can literally do it in an hour.
| If they try to do it in an hour it might take them 2.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| I hope SimulaVR does crowdfounding the legal costs instead of
| folding to facebook. This is the first and yet only VR Product i
| am deeply interested in.
| kanetw wrote:
| We're going to absorb the legal expenditures as part of our
| overall expenses, but you can crowdfund us by preordering a
| headset :)
| bbarn wrote:
| I get the arguments that Meta is forced to defend it's claim it's
| not being anticompetitive, but isn't part of a small business
| like SimulaVR's sole competitive advantage being secretive with
| it's plans because it doesn't have to publicly state everything
| it's doing?
|
| Wouldn't this take that away from them? Is it not a simple enough
| point to object to the subpoena on?
| bee_rider wrote:
| One annoying thing about Facebook is that they already have zero
| goodwill among anybody who pays attention to this kind of stuff,
| so it isn't like these kind of shenanigans will really hurt their
| reputation.
| afrcnc wrote:
| I will never understand the US legal system. How is this even
| allowed? This is IP pilfering through a sham lawsuit and the
| courts.
| LeonenTheDK wrote:
| Well that is unfortunate. I would not want to be in Simula's
| position, I'm sure they've got enough on their plate without
| having to deal with stuff like this that they barely have an
| impact on in the first place.
|
| I understand that Meta needs to prove they're not a monopoly, and
| apparently the way to do that is through other companies laying
| their cards on the table, but my goodness would I feel
| uncomfortable giving core business plans, outlooks, and
| associated data to a huge (and arguably unethical) company like
| Meta.
|
| It's unreal that this is just a thing that can be done, but I'd
| expect those documents to never reach the eyes of anyone who
| guides business decisions at Meta. Or so I hope. Or maybe this
| kind of information isn't as sensitive as I think, I don't run a
| business and have no plans to currently, so I'm not savvy in that
| department.
| chillfox wrote:
| There is no need for the executives at Meta to see these
| documents themselves to derive value from them. A lawyer seeing
| them and providing a verbal summary is more than good enough
| when deciding on strategy.
| imdsm wrote:
| Surely if Meta need another company to help them prove
| something, Meta should have to compensate them. Sure, the
| government should be able to COMMAND a company to appear, but
| for one legal entity to COMMAND another legal entity to perform
| work and make an appearance at a place, in my mind as a Brit,
| seems entirely wrong.
|
| Time to throw my Quest on eBay, not sure I want to be a part of
| this.
| sumedh wrote:
| > in my mind as a Brit, seems entirely wrong.
|
| I guess Meta is following the "If you have money, you are not
| wrong" strategy.
| [deleted]
| throbintrash wrote:
| > a huge (and arguably unethical) company like Meta.
|
| name one company at least as big as Meta that is ethical,
| please...
|
| are they a tech company? are they hiring?
| marcinzm wrote:
| Why does it matter how other companies are to their point?
| whateveracct wrote:
| It's a feckless misdirection
| throbintrash wrote:
| I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size
|
| so it's a disengineous point to bring up.
|
| the deeper realization is that is not fair (nor conducing
| to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as
| Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards
| such as being ethical.
|
| this is more important in other discussions around rights
| of corporations (and other comparalby powerful
| institutions) in contrast with the righs of human
| individuals (see also: censorship by 'private persons' but
| this person is google or something)
|
| but let's just bury my ancestor reply before going any
| deeper. gosh.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that
| size
|
| Sounds to me like an argument for breaking up Facebook.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >so it's a disengineous point to bring up.
|
| It is a perfectly valid point in terms of the impact on
| SimulaVR which is what this discussion is about. A
| company is trying to get sensitive information from them.
| Stating the company is unethical even if all other
| similar companies are as well is perfectly valid.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| How can it be unethical if this is how it's done across
| the board in the US? Meta's lawyers aren't bringing in
| some unheard of tactic here. This is par for the course.
| I'd love to hear some "ethical" means for proving without
| doubt that you have competitors. Admittedly I wouldn't be
| a good judge of their usability in court, mind.
|
| The other piece that I think the parent was making is
| that how can we judge this practice as somehow speaking
| to the ethicalness of a broader company when the decision
| making process doesn't work or act like a single mind
| (which is how we perceive ethics to work, an
| internal/personal decision wherein you way the good, bad,
| etc)?
| ramblerman wrote:
| > not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try
| and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to
| individual person standards such as being ethical
|
| What? Care to explain that a bit further.
|
| A multibillion dollar company should be held to higher
| standards than an individual
| throbintrash wrote:
| yet, they somehow get away with shitty actions which
| would be unaceptable from an individual.
|
| they are limited liability institutions after all, the
| reasoning for their existence is precisely to limit the
| liabilities (negative consequences of their actions)...
| that's where the tax-payer comes in.
| meesterdude wrote:
| > so it's a disengineous point to bring up.
|
| In the public eye, Meta is particularly unethical. It's a
| large part of their current downfall. So I don't agree
| with you that it is a disingenuous point.
| throbintrash wrote:
| facebook tried to provide equal and fair (market driven)
| access to political influence through their ad-platform;
| and they will be punished for doing so (see the Cambridge
| Analytica scandal, and subsequent relentless waves of bad
| PR against them).
|
| political influence is not open, nor fair, nor market
| driven. is power driven; and the power is trying to re-
| assert this harsh truth.
|
| and when I say "the power" I refer to the powerful people
| and their institutions who can make a political example a
| la Julian Assange; the kinds of institutions and
| secretive traditional societies who can make somebody
| commit "suicide" in a federal prison; or get somebody in
| a presidential seat. facebook is in for a rough ride.
|
| powers who would ally with china in secret "in order to
| better all of society". powers whose only competence is
| keeping power, but not making power nor doing anything
| good with it. powerful institutions (of autonomous self-
| maximizing money) who know war, and war is what they will
| use their power for (and whence their power comes).
|
| in another point in history I would be meeting some
| assassins pretty soon for daring to publish this in a
| semi-public forum. now all I get is dissuaded ("You're
| posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.") and buried
| in with the noise/spam and the garbage ([shadow]banned).
| trafficante wrote:
| This is the weirdest comment.
|
| Genuine insight sandwiched between a "Cambridge Analytica
| was FB being virtuous" opener and an oddly paranoid
| closer.
| throbintrash wrote:
| thank you, I try my best.
|
| the "FB as virtues" is an insight I glimpsed through
| Stratechery's analysis of Facebook's woes [1].
|
| > _All news sources are competing on an equal footing;
| those controlled or bought by a party are not inherently
| privileged._
|
| > _The likelihood any particular message will "break out"
| is based not on who is propagating said message but on
| how many users are receptive to hearing it. The power has
| shifted from the supply side to the demand side._
|
| > _on Facebook both small companies and large companies
| have an equal shot at customers, and both Party insiders
| and complete outsiders have an equal shot at voters._
|
| so then, apparently democracy is good, justice is good,
| but everything is better in moderation, including these
| 'good' things.
|
| the algorithmically driven market made all participants
| far more equal than they wanted to be; so they decided to
| destroy it.
|
| [1] https://stratechery.com/2021/facebook-political-
| problems/
|
| ~I'll see myself back into the psychiatric ward.~
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| What makes it not fair? Arguably if we can't hold a
| company to be ethical, wouldn't the individual concept of
| "fairness" also be off the table?
| aliqot wrote:
| green name has a point though.
| joelfried wrote:
| The way to get better behavior is to point out bad
| behavior wherever you see it, not shrug and treat it like
| a broken stair.
| musingsole wrote:
| > not shrug and treat it like a broken stair.
|
| When all but 2 of the stairs are broken in a flight --
| discussing the particularities of this break or that
| isn't very meaningful or productive. Perhaps the 2
| functional stairs are worth another look instead.
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| [deleted]
| jolmg wrote:
| > I understand that Meta needs to prove they're not a monopoly,
| and apparently the way to do that is through other companies
| laying their cards on the table, but my goodness would I feel
| uncomfortable giving core business plans, outlooks, and
| associated data to a huge (and arguably unethical) company like
| Meta.
|
| This seems too considerate to Meta. IMO, part of Meta's
| intention is to hurt SimulaVR. It wouldn't be by accident.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| IANAL, but it came from a court because it's a court order.
| Failing to respond would be contempt of court - an imprison
| able offense.
|
| AIUI, the reason that courts order cooperation for this sort
| of thing is that every party deserves the right in court to
| defend themselves as best as is possible. If in order to
| defend themselves they require information that they cannot
| present themselves but that someone else can (say your alibi
| was being at work - your boss could confirm that), then it
| becomes that party's civic duty to cooperate with the courts
| and make sure that the appropriate information can be yielded
| to ensure a just decision. If there are concerns about cost
| or potential secrecy/privacy implications, someone who is
| subpoenaed can bring that up with the judge who can then work
| with all parties to appropriately manage the situation.
| sumedh wrote:
| > then it becomes that party's civic duty to cooperate with
| the courts
|
| How is that compatible with the 5th amendment?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| stazz1 wrote:
| The interesting takeaway is that even if you don't consider
| SimulaVR a competitor of Meta, Meta does O_O
| Raed667 wrote:
| Can someone explain why is meta entitled to see a 3rd party's
| business plans, financials and statistics?
| kodah wrote:
| It's explained in the post. The FTC accused them of being anti-
| competitive. The only way to show you're not anti-competitive
| is to demand documents of your opponents that demonstrate you
| still have competition.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| [deleted]
| ekianjo wrote:
| Then why not share to the FTC themselves and not META so that
| you can still keep it confidential from your competition?
| neltnerb wrote:
| In general it's a good idea to let the defendant decide how
| to argue their case and have access to evidence, for better
| and worse.
| piggybox wrote:
| Because FTC isn't the defendant. How would anyone share
| counter evidence to the plaintiff?
| ekianjo wrote:
| then how about a neutral third party?
| [deleted]
| madamelic wrote:
| Seems like a "I'll know when I see it" situation. In that, if
| the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are
| and at least should be blocked from acquiring their
| competition.
|
| Breaking them up or taking actual action against them would
| require deeper investigation with FTC taking the lead rather
| than potentially handing sensitive documents over to the
| offending company.
|
| If the company wants to fight the block of acquisitions would
| foot the bill for everyone being supeonaed along with the
| FTC's expenses regardless of the case's success.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive,
| they probably are
|
| Wait? What?
|
| It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that
| the government is always right. I mean, if I said, all
| people the police arrest are probably guilty and should go
| to jail, I would hope you'd disagree.
| jlarocco wrote:
| > It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume
| that the government is always right.
|
| Big cases against big companies are different. Since the
| company will have (nearly) unlimited resources to fight,
| the FTC will only bring a case if they're pretty sure
| they can win, otherwise it will be a big waste of money
| all around.
|
| It's really not anything like the police arresting
| people.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The government has lost many antitrust cases. In fact,
| they often do them for _political_ reasons, not because
| they actually care about the outcome.
| piggybox wrote:
| By the same logic: if FTC thinks net neutrality is bad, it
| probably is...
| plgonzalezrx8 wrote:
| Read the post..
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Though I'm not a lawyer, I believe defendants in court cases
| are entitled to command witnesses (signed off by a judge) to
| provide evidence that could be used in their defense.
|
| It makes sense in the abstract: e.g. imagine you're accused of
| murder, and you know someone saw you somewhere else at the
| supposed time of the crime, yet they refuse to provide evidence
| to help you. It would seem reasonable they could compel you
| under that circumstance to testify.
|
| Since the FTC has initiated a court case against Meta, I assume
| they are provided a similar legal right to command competitors
| to provide evidence that they haven't behaved "anti-
| competitively".
|
| The question becomes whether, in this particular instance,
| they're abusing that privilege by demanding information they
| shouldn't be entitled to from unrelated/extraneous parties.
| bombcar wrote:
| Heh, demand that the court provide you immunity from
| prosecution for being a monopoly, or refuse to testify on the
| fifth (because you obviously are a monopoly planning on
| buying Meta).
|
| As you can see, also not a lawyer.
| mintaka5 wrote:
| very confusing how they can peel open another company's
| business plan. isn't their an about us page on their website
| JeezusJuiceTPR wrote:
| IANAL, so take this with some salt, but I don't think Meta is
| directly requesting the documents, and Meta is probably never
| going to see them. I don't think they get to request everything
| and pick through it to find a defense.
|
| Subpoenas come from the court (which is how they're able to be
| legally binding, i.e. you can be held liable---in contempt---
| for not complying), so my guess is that the court will review
| the various documents for evidence that Simula is or isn't a
| competitor, so as to decide both whether they fit the bill as a
| competitor, and whether they'll be needed during a trial. I
| imagine that the court can even decide that Simula does not
| provide evidence in either direction, so they'll uninvolve
| Simula.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| Meta requested it, meta wrote the subpoena, and meta is the
| party who will receive the supplied documents.
|
| You are confusing signed off by the court with issued by the
| court.
| bombcar wrote:
| Documents have to be given to both sides or it's a pretty
| easy mistrial. It is _likely_ nobody but Meta 's lawyers will
| ever look at any of it, but they will look to try to build a
| defense.
|
| And if something interesting WAS found, it would get out. And
| some of these things would become public record, either way.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| What if you just give them a very loose summary and see. Do the
| minimum first
| shrewduser wrote:
| man, hacker news is just not what it used to be.
| fencepost wrote:
| Not a lawyer or involved in the legal system, but is this a
| situation where you can respond with your rates for providing
| this expert witness service? If so, this may be a situation where
| you can charge them $500/hr plus costs (eg atty) for the service
| of extracting, redacting and summarizing some of the information
| they've requested.
|
| Edit: your attorney may have a better idea of what rates for this
| might be, but I'd suggest looking into what it costs to have a
| known and respected third party physician do chart review and
| testify in court in malpractice cases, then consider what they'd
| charge if they were also expected to anonymize and show
| information from their own practice _and patient charts_.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Meta is allowed to defend themselves against lawsuits. SimulaVR
| is a startup in the space. They have a shot in VR, or at least
| believe they do. SimulaVR a great example for Meta to use to
| defend themselves against a stupid lawsuit.
|
| The FTC shouldn't be bringing this case. VR is still up for
| grabs. Defining the relevant market as the "dedicated fitness
| virtual reality app market" is questionable, and the idea it
| "proves the value of virtual reality" is nonsense.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/07/...
|
| The idea that meta have some dominant position that can't be
| overcome is like suggesting Excite or Altavista had a dominant
| position in search that couldn't be overcome in the 90's, or
| MySpace in social in the early 00's. It's too early to call this
| market "won".
| pid_0 wrote:
| ece wrote:
| > VR is still up for grabs
|
| Curious statement, considering the FTC is trying to preserve
| competition in the space. Excite and Altavista weren't trying
| to buy up the biggest websites around at the time.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Yes and they are overreaching in response to a perceived miss
| many years ago when FB bought Instagram. The VR market is so
| young and small that it doesn't need regulatory intervention.
| Let's allow it play out a little bit before we get regulators
| involved who think things like this app is something which
| "proves the value of virtual reality to users".
|
| And yeah, they were, and they were being bought and sold, and
| Yahoo too. There was lots of action in the space. Virtually
| everyone involved went under despite having a dominant
| position for a hot minute.
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