Less than a month away from the Apple vs. Epic trial, Facebook is getting involved. According to a letter filed with the court, Apple requested some documents from Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t want to provide them.
Since Facebook’s VP of gaming Vivek Sharma is set to testify on behalf of Epic, Apple is asking for more than 17,000 documents related to Sharma that the company finds relevant for the case, which Facebook responded as an “untimely, unfair, and unjustified request to redo fact discovery.”
As reported by MacRumors, Facebook already provided Apple with more than 1,600 documents, including 200 involving Sharma. Zuckerberg’s company said:
It’s still unclear how the Apple vs. Epic case will go, but last week the Fortnite maker filed a UK antitrust complaint against Apple, despite having lost a court case in the country over the same issue.
If Apple believed that production was insufficient in any way, it had every opportunity to move to compel within 7 days of the close of discovery as required by the Court’s Rules. Apple chose not to, making this motion untimely. Instead, claiming surprise by Epic’s disclosure of Mr. Sharma as a trial witness – even though Epic’s complaint quoted him by name – Apple now demands that Facebook review and produce an enormous number of additional documents.
You can read the letter filled with the court by Apple here.
Our senior executives look forward to sharing with the court the very positive impact the App Store has had on innovation, economies across the world, and the customer experience over the last 12 years. We feel confident the case will prove that Epic purposefully breached its agreement solely to increase its revenues, which is what resulted in their removal from the App Store. By doing that, Epic circumvented the security features of the App Store in a way that would lead to reduced competition and put consumers’ privacy and data security at tremendous risk.
