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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Question:
Is meta's lawyers bound in any way to treat simulaVR the same way you treated your subpoenaees?
I don't even care if they do, or would, the question is, are they legally bound to do so? If not, that's a systemic issue.
I suspect the answer is no they aren't, and the burden is on the subpoenaees to convince the court to limit the burdensomeness of the subpoena, which is itself a burden that is unacceptable.
