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.
> 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!)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Hire a lawyer for a few hours to confirm what I say since I’m some random internet guy.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
>...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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't know if this is even remotely a possibility but it sure would beat dealing with constant CSS (can't see s*t)
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.
VR there has never been exclusively about gaming nor has gaming been the overall goal of VR since their acquisition. The way they talked about it back in the day was, if I recall accurately, that they were focused on three pillars: "The metaverse", "The overlay", and "The future of work". Social presence, real-life AR metadata, and expanding the screens and capabilities of working professionals, respectively.
The direction of their research and implementation has, at least to my knowledge, been oriented literally towards creating a new category of general purpose productivity devices and admitting as much in a very public blog post is a pretty big own-goal if the idea is to try to avoid the subpoena by distinguishing yourselves (assuming you're speaking on behalf of SimulaVR).
I assume you've read?
He missed the boat on browsers and smartphones, so he is aiming for total monopoly of what he believes is the next-big-thing™.
Go watch any long-form interview with him, such as with Lex Fridman. It becomes rather clear that he wants to be more like how Steve Jobs is seen by the wider public: as an innovator and pioneer, not as a power-hungry moneymaker.
I wonder if Zuckerberg suspects it might not be as well but, hey, Hail Mary!
> 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.
Or maybe I'm wrong and they are already selling a product? I didn't see it on the website.
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 Āmrikā" 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.
[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/why-is-the-simula-one-so-expensive...
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to be in that boat. But after seeing where Chrome ended up, and how this affects the web today, I can't help but think that long-term, we'd be better off if the megacorps disappeared together with the funding.
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.
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.
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.
Public opinion on the brand seem to hold more accountability than the courts for these Mega Corps, After all Facebook did become Meta FWIW.
Kubernetes is an absolute mess, and I would never willingly subject myself to it.
If a humongous corporation is giving something away for free, it’s either because it suits their agenda, or because it’s so irrelevant to them they do not care.
But as megacorps go, FB seems to have had a “come to Jesus” moment on those kinds of mistakes and done a hard pivot to a more responsible and adult posture. It was built by people barely out of childhood, certainly I was still a child when I worked there and putting a 20-something in charge of a powerful company is going to create some collateral damage. No one can say with a straight face that FB hasn’t fucked up more than once or twice.
But those kids grew up a bit, whether via altruism or pragmatism have decided to step quite a bit more carefully, and unlike 10 years ago, FB is probably closer to “don’t be evil” than Google is. It’s still a ruthless megacorp answering to shareholders, but I wouldn’t say that in 2022 it’s even close to the worst of the bunch.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Many other larger companies have fought these subpoenas (Snap, etc) and, as far as we can tell, still had to hand over items.
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.
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.
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.
As you can see, also not a lawyer.
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.
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.
And if something interesting WAS found, it would get out. And some of these things would become public record, either way.
You are confusing signed off by the court with issued by the court.
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.
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.
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
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".
>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.
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.
Time to throw my Quest on eBay, not sure I want to be a part of this.
The federal government is compelling action.
I guess Meta is following the "If you have money, you are not wrong" strategy.
This seems too considerate to Meta. IMO, part of Meta's intention is to hurt SimulaVR. It wouldn't be by accident.
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.
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.
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...
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)
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?
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)
May your lawyer be cheap, vicious, despicable, and never-losing.
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."
"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"
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).
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.
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".
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.
And yeah, they were, and they were being bought and sold, and Yahoo too. There was lots of m&a action in the space. Virtually everyone involved went under despite having a dominant position for a hot minute.
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.
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.
how is this even allowed under the law? Can Facebook really just demand this?
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.
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.
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.
That's FDA.
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.
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.
Of course I'm not a lawyer and don't really know what I'm talking about, and this is not legal advice.
Doesn't seem like a coincidence they are the only tiny headset subpeonaed while others are big (public) corporations.
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.
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.
Wouldn't this take that away from them? Is it not a simple enough point to object to the subpoena on?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33108032
Wondering if it’s just a coincidence that Meta is taking all these measures now.
In fact they should consider changing their motto to "Injunctioned by Meta"
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)
"We're don't view ourselves in competition with Meta"
