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"The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subseque

"The most shocking thing to me about that isn't the malicious compliance, but that even after a court injunction, and fully knowing that there could be subsequent discovery, they have people putting something like that in writing." Keep in mind that once you lose, the process is no longer adversarial. In ~all cases you will be required to provide evidence and status updates and such on implementation of an injunction, among other things. So you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply. These are the kinds of records you would normally see as a result. The only shocking thing is that they didn't lie :) They often do try to hide bad stuff through privilege anyway - I believe they tried here and lost but i will go back and look - but that doesn't often work.

egonschiele 1y ago
> you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply I would argue that the text the parent comment has pulled out is not part of the record keeping you need to do to comply. Lawyers will tell you to have certain conversations in person, and it is surprising that some of these conversations happened in text instead of in person.
- DannyBee 1y ago
  i'm aware of what lawyers tell you sometimes, since i am in fact, a lawyer in addition to being an engineer, but you have to think about the context as well. You aren't talking about trying to avoid another side finding it in mountains of discovery, you are talking about trying to avoid a judge who easily has the power to force your engineers to testify under oath about what they are doing, finding out about what you are doing. This is a very bad plan :) On top of that I'll also offer to you that the days of trying to avoid generating evidence as a mechanism for avoiding bad things happening are fast dying after google got sanctioned for having off the record conversations for exactly this reason. It's bad advice - the better advice i used to give my clients is - if you are not doing anything wrong, don't act like you are doing anything wrong. If you are doing something wrong, stop.
  - avar 1y ago
    > If you are doing > something wrong, stop. You may be a lawyer, but this is clearly bad advice if your client was Apple. It's not like they couldn't afford competent legal advice, and surely they either knew they were flaunting the injunction, or could have predicted that the judge would take this view of their activity. So, they're set on doing the "wrong" thing, but could still use legal advice. What I'm amazed at up-thread is how seemingly incompetent they were at changing their workflow so they wouldn't hand the court evidence on a silver platter. In this case, surely they could have pulled all the stakeholders into a room with a whiteboard, and made sure nobody kept any records of the meeting. They'd have ended up with the same wording, but the court couldn't have merely done a text search of relevant Slack conversations. Yes, the court could have eventually forced everyone who was in that room to testify, but the end result would have been a bunch of "I think so-and-so wanted it more such-and-such". Surely that's better than the sort of quotes the court could copy/paste into its decision.
    - Osiris 1y ago
      At some point it has to be documented as to the decisions made and the reasoning. If there is literally no documentation up until the final moment, doesn't that itself act as evidence that they were consciously and deliberately not wanting their reasoning documented? Why not just do the right thing. Damn.
      - avar 1y ago
        > At some point it has > to be documented as to > the decisions made and > the reasoning. It really doesn't, I've worked in large organizations where almost all text strings shown to customers were the decision of some UX design sitting at their desk, with no "paper trail". In this case (approximately page 35-40) you can see the "execs" had clearly provided guidance on the interface needing to be "scary" The teams tasked with implementing that then proceed to create an extensive and incriminating on-the-record discussion, including things that the court could subsequently use to contradict their testimony. They could have just ... not done any of that. Whatever "exec" involved could have written the copy themselves. The court could still infer that the interface was in violation, as they're doing here, but didn't need to be handed incriminating statements on a silver platter.

egonschiele 1y ago

> you do practically have to keep records of what you are doing to comply I would argue that the text the parent comment has pulled out is not part of the record keeping you need to do to comply. Lawyers will tell you to have certain conversations in person, and it is surprising that some of these conversations happened in text instead of in person.

DannyBee 1y ago
i'm aware of what lawyers tell you sometimes, since i am in fact, a lawyer in addition to being an engineer, but you have to think about the context as well. You aren't talking about trying to avoid another side finding it in mountains of discovery, you are talking about trying to avoid a judge who easily has the power to force your engineers to testify under oath about what they are doing, finding out about what you are doing. This is a very bad plan :) On top of that I'll also offer to you that the days of trying to avoid generating evidence as a mechanism for avoiding bad things happening are fast dying after google got sanctioned for having off the record conversations for exactly this reason. It's bad advice - the better advice i used to give my clients is - if you are not doing anything wrong, don't act like you are doing anything wrong. If you are doing something wrong, stop.
- avar 1y ago
  > If you are doing > something wrong, stop. You may be a lawyer, but this is clearly bad advice if your client was Apple. It's not like they couldn't afford competent legal advice, and surely they either knew they were flaunting the injunction, or could have predicted that the judge would take this view of their activity. So, they're set on doing the "wrong" thing, but could still use legal advice. What I'm amazed at up-thread is how seemingly incompetent they were at changing their workflow so they wouldn't hand the court evidence on a silver platter. In this case, surely they could have pulled all the stakeholders into a room with a whiteboard, and made sure nobody kept any records of the meeting. They'd have ended up with the same wording, but the court couldn't have merely done a text search of relevant Slack conversations. Yes, the court could have eventually forced everyone who was in that room to testify, but the end result would have been a bunch of "I think so-and-so wanted it more such-and-such". Surely that's better than the sort of quotes the court could copy/paste into its decision.
  - Osiris 1y ago
    At some point it has to be documented as to the decisions made and the reasoning. If there is literally no documentation up until the final moment, doesn't that itself act as evidence that they were consciously and deliberately not wanting their reasoning documented? Why not just do the right thing. Damn.
    - avar 1y ago
      > At some point it has > to be documented as to > the decisions made and > the reasoning. It really doesn't, I've worked in large organizations where almost all text strings shown to customers were the decision of some UX design sitting at their desk, with no "paper trail". In this case (approximately page 35-40) you can see the "execs" had clearly provided guidance on the interface needing to be "scary" The teams tasked with implementing that then proceed to create an extensive and incriminating on-the-record discussion, including things that the court could subsequently use to contradict their testimony. They could have just ... not done any of that. Whatever "exec" involved could have written the copy themselves. The court could still infer that the interface was in violation, as they're doing here, but didn't need to be handed incriminating statements on a silver platter.