Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

simulavr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 478 posts

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#311

Post by caslon »

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…

Simula isn't even an American company.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#312

Post by [deleted] »

kanetw wrote: post #242
tannhauser23 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 H…

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.

[deleted]

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#313

Post by mkmk3 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #259
mlyle wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Simula may not want to hurt meta (a competitor) when that competitor is burning billions in cash to prop up a VR market. They may benefit from a growing consumer awareness and UX research.

What they may or may not desire is less relevant in the face of what external bodies compel them to do

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#314

Post by [deleted] »

tannhauser23 wrote: post #212
Huh1337 wrote: post #196

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#315

Post by danaris »

giobox wrote: post #241
cortesoft wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 someo…

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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#316

Post by danra »

benreesman wrote: post #177
danra wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporate funding of all the open-source projects that wouldn't exist without the megacorps 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 contribu…

Sidebar: I don't know what "tech-washing" means. When I see that a company is laundering some bias or some social advantage through a machine learning model I just call it money laundering, because the inputs and outputs are both money and I think we've coined enough new victimhood words per year every year for many years. If a company is profiting off it's "open-source" contributions, getting out more than it's putt…

By "techwashing" I mean using some of the money a company makes in its main business (which in the case of Meta and some other corporates has a bad impact on society) to make a positive technical contribution to the public , thus helping existing and prospective employees work there with less of a guilty conscience.

Similar, to e.g. a pharmaceutical company raising the price of a medicine excessively, but then donating some of the money to build a hospital.

It's just that in the case of tech companies, the reputation washing is done via technical contributions.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#317

Post by jonas21 »

tannhauser23 wrote: post #212
Huh1337 wrote: post #196

Earlier 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…

Judging by the responses in this thread, it seems like many folks on HN have never worked with an attorney before (which isn't too surprising).

Do you have any advice on how to find a competent attorney with reasonable fees who can do the specific work that you need done? The one time I had to do this for my business on short notice, I used Yelp and Google, and it was somewhat disastrous. I think it would be really helpful for me, and a lot of other folks, to know the right way to do this.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#318

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Kiro wrote: post #160
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 think you're giving HN too much credit. Threads involving certain topics (e.g. big tech) are completely overrun with snark and hate that I don't see much of the relentless curiosity you're talking about.

Yeah it's definitely been making me pull my engagement back on HN. It even motivated me to get onto Twitter lol. At some point I want to read something a bit more stimulating than Tech Nextdoor. I originally came here from Digg and Slashdot because I enjoyed talking with other engineers and founders in the weeds, but I think the HN crowd has drifted far away from that start.

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.

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#319

Post by [deleted] »

LeonenTheDK wrote: post #8

Well that is unfortunate. I would not want to be in Simula's position, I'm sure they've got enough on their plate without having to deal with stuff like this that they barely have an impact on in the first place. 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 c…

[deleted]

Re: SimulaVR Has Been Subpoenaed by Meta Platforms, Inc

#320

Post by chatterhead »

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…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN