Apologies, I apparently read too much into your statement about difficulty of hiring a legal defense and your "hope [that] they leave us alone." Good luck and I hope this doesn't take the wind out of your sails too much.

If that's true, it sounds like companies have been weaponizing the legal system to get access to proprietary information from their competitors. Surely that has got to be illegal somehow?

The court decides whether a subpoena should be upheld or not. If the judge has signed off on this one, then it's all legit. Failing to comply would be contempt of court.

I'll never understand how US court system basically allow you to randomly force anyone unrelated to a case into it and suffer the legal cost. It make it so easy to weaponize any case to your advantage.

What if a ruling requires information held by someone else? Should the case just be dismissed because of lack of evidence? Having a functional justice system is probably worth some snags.

The legal cost aspect is unfortunate. However, as others have mentioned, the court probably doesn't require the assembly of new documents, but rather submission of existing ones. So while there is a cost, it's not devastating.

The interesting question is whether or not this specific subpoena has real merit, or if the court was played by Meta.

Like many things in the world, it all only works because the vast majority of people aren't assholes.

As it gets more and more weaponized the slow arm of the law will move to prevent it.

I know it's not helpful at this point, but you really should have had a relationship with a lawyer already. But now is the next best time. This is just the first time you're running into issues. As you grow, you're almost guaranteed to hit more. You'd also be smart to have a lawyer available to review all of your intellectual property, terms of service, privacy policies, etc.

I'm just a solo punter myself, but having my legal counsel already setup, knowing that I can call them at any time, rather than having to scramble to find someone in the moment a problem happens, gives me a lot of peace of mind.

Given how you're positioned as an Open Source company, maybe the Electronic Frontier Foundation can help you find someone good.

We already have standing legal counsel. George made it sound like we're just now seeking a lawyer, but we already reviewed our policies etc in the past.

Time to get well-versed in malicious compliance.

Malicious compliance is a good way to get thrown in contempt. Courts aren't stupid.

A game in which a small startup can only choose among different bad endings