How Is This Legal? Steam Ordered To Submit Sales Data To Apple

TLDR: Epic Games is involved in a law suit with Apple. Apple submits a subpoena to get sales data from Valve (the owner of Steam) about 436 games. How is this legal?

As more time passes, it becomes clear that the legal system in the US is a total joke. This is a country in which you can sign a contract for practically anything. If a company kills you because of a direct action that puts your life in danger (like what kept happening with America’s Top Model) and you signed a contract in which it says that company is not responsible for any harm that happens to you, it is impossible to sue. I mentioned America’s Top Model because all participants signed such a contract. As a result, the network behind the show did horrible things to the models and could have actually killed them several times. If that happened, nothing could have been done from a legal point of view.

Getting back to the subject, Epic Games is in a legal battle with Apple. It claims that Apple locks the developers into the App Store ecosystem, forcing them to pay taxes for in-app purchases of 30%.

Apple’s response was that others do the same thing and actually drafted a subpoena to get data from Valve, the company that owns Steam. Apple tries to prove that it is the same as the competition.

And a judge, Thomas S. Hixson, actually ordered Valve to respect the subpoena and to deliver the data Apple requested.

So, in a battle between two companies, the judge decided that it is completely legal to involve another company.

Yeah. This is legal. And it can actually lead to fines for Valve because there is a high possibility the company would not be able to gather all the data requested until the deadline, which is mid-March. Jay P. Srinivasan, Apple’s lawyer, actually said that Apple was entitled to request data for all the 30,000 games available in the Steam store. Isn’t Apple kind that it only asked for 436 games?

Here’s the deal.

I do not care about what will happen during the July court hearing between Epic Games and Apple. This subpoena actually gives Apple very important sensitive data that belongs to another company. And it involves all the game developers of those 436 games. And Apple wanted data starting from 2015. The judge only allowed the gathering of data from 2017.

Regardless of what happens in the July trial, Apple just gained access to incredibly important data for them that can drastically influence business decisions in the future.

This should not be legal.

But it is.

To put things into perspective, let’s put this situation into an easier scenario to understand. Let’s say you sell socks. There are two more stores in your neighborhood that also sell socks. The two owners start to argue and one of them accuses the other that they lock companies that make socks into working with them and charge 30% fees on each sale. The store that is accused responds by creating a subpoena in which it asks you to provide all sales data for all the socks you sold since 2015.

Once again, how is this legal?

Yeah, the socks example is stupid and it has some clear flaws. But, the same thing applies.

I am incredibly surprised to see people saying that the decision is right and there is no problem with it. I do not care if the law is on Apple’s side. There is no ethical justification in this case to request data from a business when you are in a law suit with another one.