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A summer intern once saved Valve from a near-fatal lawsuit(pcgamer.com)
70 points by indigoabstract 5 days ago | 32 comments
fardo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In an era of massive scale companies and giant projects, it's fascinating how often it feels like most of the success of a project or company's big successes ultimately hinge on the actions of a few key individuals in the right place at the right time - and it never fails to surprise me how little overlap these individuals and the actual actual company org charts share.

kortilla 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Org charts are structured around running the company day to day. The surprising one-off big boosts from an individual are by definition not reflected in an org chart.

Hamuko 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world."

bejd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4

Nexxxeh 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

There were so many excellent touches and insights in the documentary. And I got goosebumps in a couple of places.

Also the Half-Life documentary they released last year was one hour long. The Half-Life 2 documentary is two hours long. I sure doesn't feel like 2 hours.

Highly recommended. (There are manual English subtitles included that seem perfect too, if you need them.)

mettamage 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if the summer intern got rewarded for this save

Temporary_31337 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can we appreciate that Vivendi Universalis went after Gabe personally and no one is in jail for this.

A_D_E_P_T 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's totally normal for corporations to go after business executives personally in civil cases, but it's also usually pretty easy for those targeted executives to have the claims against them dismissed. Typically it's just an intimidation tactic.

etiennebausson 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It may be common, but it is not normal. It is certainly not ethical.

latexr 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> It may be common, but it is not normal.

Those words are synonyms. What you seem to be objecting to is that it should not be normal or common. But it is. “Normal” doesn’t mean “acceptable” or “neutral”, it means “standard”, “usual”, “typical”, “expected”, “common”. Slavery was never ethical or good, but at a point in history it was normal.

Don’t avoid what is in front of you. Do fight for a better normal but recognise when something you disapprove with is the current normal.

A_D_E_P_T 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These days, sadly, ethical behavior has almost nothing to do with the civil courts. Even in the article at OP, you can see how cases become little more than battles of financial attrition, with tactics (like dumping millions of foreign-language documents) designed to force your opponent to spend huge sums of money in the hopes of forcing a settlement.

CPLX an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You might want to think about this this other way.

If you were severely harmed by the actions of a specific person who happened to also be a business executive, should you be allowed to pursue that business executive in court?

Let’s say for example a wealthy man decides, for his personal amusement, to bulldoze your home. The bulldozer is owned by a LLC with no assets or insurance but the man is very rich. Should you be allowed to sue him personally?

How about if a family decides to engage in purposeful behavior in selling a deadly addictive drug that kills hundreds of thousands of people, making billions of dollars. Should they be allowed to walk away?

The “strange” convention that we adhere to is that we let people shield themselves from the consequences of their behavior behind corporate structures. Not the other way around.

The least we can do is ask them to show up in court and explain why that legal fiction should apply to them.

amelius 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nowadays you'd just ask an LLM to read through those Korean emails.

4gotunameagain 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

And you could never be sure it indeed found the needle in the haystack.

kortilla 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Well if it turned something up you can just check the document yourself.

What you can’t be sure of is if it claims there is nothing interesting.

False positives are fine for this use case.

bayindirh 6 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

...or hallucinated it, even if it finds one.

regularfry 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While not a criminal case, the Stringer Bell rule strikes again.

mitjam 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The devil is in the detail, I think in the age of LLMs this will become harder as docs can now be better scanned before they’re handed out.

rob74 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I think current LLMs would be completely lost with the task "scan these documents for information that could be risky for our case": they would either produce tons of false positives, overlook actual risks, or both.

mschuster91 an hour ago | parent [-]

At least you can reasonably use them for translation and in a second pass summarize or just have it detect if a document contains specific keywords / phrases.

ano-ther an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

In a discovery you don’t really have a choice.

On the other hand, perhaps the summer intern would have had an easier time finding something (and the defense more time to spot potential gaps in their arguments).

lofaszvanitt 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Vivendi was a big ruthless bogey in that era of gaming.

wk_end 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, all the intern did was comb through some documents in his native language. I’m sure if he weren’t there, they would’ve just hired a translator (much cheaper than lawyers). Not to disparage the work they did or anything.

The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.

rob74 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Ok, imagine the following: you are a (young and probably underpaid) summer intern; you suddenly get the task to drop whatever else you were doing (which was probably more interesting) and read through megabytes of mind-numbing documents; you have little to no personal "skin in the game"; and still, you somehow manage to muster the motivation to pay enough attention so you are able to spot the one interesting email among the thousands of irrelevant ones. Does it sound more remarkable now?

A_D_E_P_T 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's also strange that the Korean side didn't destroy that evidence and handed it over in discovery. Most companies who destroy evidence at least try to do a decent job and go all the way. If the servers and individuals responsible were in Korea, an American civil suit would have a hard time reaching them.

InDubioProRubio 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

When the command comes to destroy evidence, the company already unravels. The CEOS and upper echelons do no longer hold the power of career life and death, instead they are just "visibly" pawns in the larger game of society, playing "prison" or "no prison". In that moment, even the most loyal individual realizes that the game is lost- and that deleting evidence that proofs your innocence, would increment you for nothing.

Thus that command - is never followed. There are always copies of the bad shit everywhere. The underlings are not that stupid.

rightbyte 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe they destroyed every relevant mail but missed that one?

Hamuko 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I assume most company executives are not experts at evidence destruction. And in this case, it seems that they destroyed all of the documents and then just sent out a "We've now destroyed everything you asked us" email reply back without thinking to include that in the list of things to destroy.

Hikikomori 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was also a needle in a haystack as they got document dumped on in discovery to exhaust their few remaining resources.

Etheryte an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah no, this is such a silly take on the situation. Finding anything useful in literally millions of pages of arbitrary documents, when you don't even know if there is anything useful, is an amazing feat. "Just" hiring a translator could also be prohibitively expensive at this volume when your company is already on the verge of bankruptcy. Even running a regular text search across millions of pages of what was probably a mix of emails, word documents, pdfs, etc takes a while today, never mind in the early 2000s. Keep in mind that this was probably an intern on what was a regular computer at the time, not some fancy distributed compute cluster. Finding anything useful in that pile is a gargantuan feat, even if there was no language barrier.

thrance 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My hate for Vivendi and his owner, Vincent Bolloré, grows every time I read about either of them. He is a known far-right billionaire attempting to get his hands on the most media he can, to push his fascist agenda in France. That his company uses scummy practices to bully smaller ones in court is not really surprising.

yapyap an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

TLDR: a summer intern who spoke Korean was able to find a single email in a million pages of document for a rather malicious counterlawsuit made against Valve because the other company, Vivendi was distributing Valve IP outside of the discussed regions and Valve sued them for that.