Can't wait for armchair lawyers making wild accusations on things they don't understand in these comments
SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
221–230 of 478 posts
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#222I'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…
> 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"
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.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#223Who pays the legal fees in this case?
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#224I'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…
> 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"
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).
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 lawy…
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.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
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.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#227Couldn'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.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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....
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
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.
Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc
#230Who pays the legal fees in this case?
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.