Comment by Elidrake24
5 years ago
They made claims and threatened legal action; certainly the public doesn’t need to legally know until a lawsuit is actually brought, but they would be required to present such evidence to the public in court.
Do they have to currently? No, of course not. But this isn’t someone claiming that another did something behind closed doors to bait public disclosure. They opened this door by making the claims, from a standpoint of whether one might want to do business with replit in the future it’s entirely reasonable to ask for proof of what otherwise are slanderous claims.
You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court. They can be shown to the judge “in camera” and redacted from public filings.
If all you had to do to get a company to reveal all its secrets were to sue it on some plausible legal theory and conduct discovery, everyone would do it.
>You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court
well excellent that we're not in a court here on HN or Twitter then. If he decides to intimidate someone without putting any concrete evidence up for it we're well within our rights to drag him over the coals for it. Dogs that bark don't bite, if he wanted to avoid this he should have gone to his lawyers directly, instead he's already issuing half-baked apologies in this very thread. Which means he has zilch and just wanted to bully a recent graduate into taking his product off the internet.