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SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

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Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#191

Post by tannhauser23 »

M4v3R wrote: post #124
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#192

Post by colejohnson66 »

unknownaccount wrote: post #184
TheRealPomax wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

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 a…

> 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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#194

Post by bonestamp2 »

dsign wrote: post #27

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…

> 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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#195

Post by mlyle »

whimsicalism wrote: post #189
mlyle wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, an…

Right, so you can imagine this evidence would be useful to Meta if the boundaries were drawn differently than how you are imagining.

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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#196

Post by Huh1337 »

tannhauser23 wrote: post #191
M4v3R wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 att…

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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#197

Post by tannhauser23 »

georgewsinger wrote: post #152
benreesman wrote: post #133

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 fo…

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 u…

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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#198

Post by ginko »

tannhauser23 wrote: post #187
HillRat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fac…

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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#199

Post by majormajor »

georgewsinger wrote: post #51
cableshaft wrote: post #40

>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 PC…

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 l…

"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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#200

Post by throbintrash »

ramblerman wrote: post #72
throbintrash wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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

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.

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