Apple's homework is due Monday no matter what, says judge | Hacker News Reader

Apple's homework is due Monday no matter what, says judge

theverge.com

87 pointsthunderbong109 comments

What the hell are they going to do with "1.3 million documents"? What even is a document in this context?

A document could be a memo, meeting note, an email, sms/imessage, chat thread, …

Think of “a document” as “something written down”.

Something you would store in a document database :)

I'm also quite stunned. For a corp that's been running an electronic shopfront for years, something like this shouldn't be that big of a surprise.

a document likely means an email. this sort of request will be something like "send us a copy of every piece of communication from the last 10 years that you have which contain "epic", "revenue split", "monopoly", or "shut out competitors". from there the documents will be reviewed by some combination of AI and unlucky law school students on an internship to see whether Apple is doing things they shouldn't.

Do we want this kind of law, as citizen?

It’s self incrimination, but that’s not the main point. It shows we’re trying to guess what the moral person was thinking while doing the crime. Is this ok in the justice theory?

Many crimes do indeed hinge on the mental state of the person doing the deed. The alternative is absolute liability, where e.g. you could be guilty of purchasing stolen goods even if you thought they were legitimate; even if you specifically asked and told the goods weren't stolen.

Yes we do. The "code is law, and law is code" crowd fail to understand that reality is messy and context must be accounted for.

To determine between wrong and illegal: intent matters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

(In the US) Self incrimination is only protected in criminal contexts. In civil cases, you can be compelled to do, or say things that harm your own case, because in civil matters you are not being incriminated by definition.

this isn't quite true. you can't be compelled in a civil case to provide evidence of you committing a crime. it's just that doing so will be really bad in the civil case since it allows the court to draw an "adverse inference" that whatever you aren't disclosing probably really sucks for your case.

It's interesting that you can be "punished" by a judge in the EU for making a last minute request. This is considered standard practice in the US because it gives your opponents less time to organize or respond.

EU? This lawsuit is taking place in the states (CA).

If you read the article you’ll see the judges explanation as to why last minute was not acceptable.

Maybe read the ruling? Apart from being in the US, Apple misrepresented their progress over multiple status reports, and then last minute acted like they need more time. Lets maybe not give the lawyers of trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt when they are employing obvious delay tactics, shall we?

They didn’t punish them for making a last minute request. They just told them no.

Funny you would say that, because this court case is taking place in the US, not in the EU.

Yeah, I thought another comment mentioned it was in the EU and read the article with that in mind. Good thing there's ten different people to gently inform me of that.

Leaving aside that this is clearly a case in the Northern District of California, no; that sort of thing is what gets discovery special masters appointed to keep you in line in the first place, and this ruling appears to be a discovery special master keeping a party in line.

You're talking about filing documents and arguments the other side has to respond to. The courts do NOT have patience for last-minute requests to bend procedure, because the side making a request wasn't acting in good faith. This isn't previously-unknown evidence being suddenly discovered. How many documents Apple has about this and how long it would take to go through them is stuff they could have known, should have known before this week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com