The (relevant part of the) 5th amendment does not say "you never have to cooperate with the courts" it says you can not be compelled to incriminate yourself. People and companies are compelled to cooperate with courts all the time - that's literally what a subpoena is.
Btoh you and the justice system. You could plead the fifth on personal incrimination, but that may result in an investigation into your personal matters now that you've indirectly hinted that the facts you were asked to present could indicate wrongdoing.
The system could also consider your testimony to be so important as to proclaim that you shall not be prosecutable for anything that you say as part of your testimony.
Of course, all of this applies only to things within your mind. You cannot use the 5th to get out of presenting any and all existing materials that may even be perceived to be relevant to the court order. That's likely to be as initially broad as emails, business plans and documents, road maps, etc. Obviously, impeding these efforts would be contempt of court or (in the case that you destroy anything) possibly worse.
In practice though, your attorney works with the court and other parties' attorneys to identify what exactly would be relevant to the case and if any special secrecy regarding those materials and testimony is warranted. Case gets worked out, life moves on.
I thought it was clear in the post that Meta is being compelled by the federal government to prove they are not a monopoly and as part of this they need to present a case where they establish they have legitimate competitors. This requires information about the competitors.
This is typical for court cases. Even if a party may have little to do with what’s going on trial, if they’re a relevant party in any way they can get sucked in and be forced to give a deposition. It’s totally possible to “plead the 5th” here, but the rationale here is all the relevant facts to a case have to be brought to light in order to make an informed judgment.
First of all, the 5th amendment only applies to individuals, not entities like corporations. Second, it's main purpose is to not incriminate yourself - sharing business plans is hardly incriminating in itself (unless the business plan is specifically to commit a crime, but that would be dumb... Oh wait).
To me this feels like that Meta is trying to simultaneously measure up the market by making their competitors give out business plans that, frankly, are none of Meta's business, while also tying up smaller companies they feel threatened by in legal battles, as to drain their resources and run them into the ground (or, just a more appealing position where Meta can buy them up). And the latter isn't really new - I mean, Amazon pretty much "fired" mid-level executives and "placed" them at various competitors with the sole task of driving down the valuation of the competitor for easier purchase.
Either way, this kind of abuse of the legal system is disgusting, and even if the subpoena has legitimate reasons, it places an unfair amount of responsibility on an otherwise uninvolved party. The federal government could compel your company to produce an employee who can jump over a 5m wall, that doesn't mean it's suddenly possible.
I think many constitutional protections do apply in case the USA is prosecuting an individual, eg even as a non American you could take the 5th if an American court was trying to convict you.
However, when you're asking to enter the country as a non US citizen your options are essentially to do whatever the border services agents ask you to do or turn around and go home.
Are you actually saying that Facebook is working to prevent _future generations of humanity_ from existing? I can't imagine how you expect people to take you seriously.
It's important to understand that this was already a very violent time in Montreal. Separatist terrorists were running rampant, and had a non-zero degree of public support.
What a nightmare. I bet this raises the hair on the back of the necks of a lot of other researchers. So much time and momentum can be invested into a research track like this.
Is this a nightmare? I read a story of someone who had a very reasonable, strong emotional response to the error, but ultimately got credit for coming clean and republished their results with new data. (And a different conclusion.)
This is exactly how I'd expect something like this to work -- the author isn't a bad person because they made an error. The co-authors aren't bad people because they failed to catch it. Software and science are hard, mistakes are going to happen.
If anything, I think the researchers learned valuable lessons, and are better researchers as a result. They have an anecdote they can share with more junior researchers about this frightening thing that happened to them, and use that to grow more people.
We should celebrate people who take the time to handle their mistakes properly and share the lessons openly.
I don't think she's a bad person, and I appreciate her response to the situation.
But building a year (years?) around a project, attending multiple conferences for it, bringing up a couple students on a research idea, then finding it's all a software bug? That's a nightmare.
