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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

They don't have a right to see secret documents other people have. We'll see.

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.

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.

>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.

We aren't throwing a hissy fit lol. We're just stating the facts and are working with our lawyers to resolve this.

why not just respond to their subpoena with one line answers....

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.

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 [..] 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.

hah these sorts of comments definitely smell like there are HNers who likes FAANG money and wanna defend their patrons

> 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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Stealing secret plans from companies under the guise of being the POOR VICTIM!

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