In a bit of malicious compliance, Vivendi turned over millions of pages of Korean language documents from its local subsidiary during the discovery phase of Valve’s cybercafe lawsuit, with anything potentially useful to Valve buried under both the volume of material and a language barrier. Quackenbush turned to a summer intern identified only as “Andrew” in the documentary. A native Korean speaker who also majored in Korean language studies in college, Andrew found the needle in the haystack: An email where one Korean Vivendi executive discussed the destruction of documents related to the Valve case to their superior, with the implication that the more junior executive was ordered to do so. With this evidence in hand, Valve was able to turn the tables on Vivendi, securing a highly favorable settlement and full ownership of its IP moving forward.
It’s not clear to me how the email described was helpful though?
Vivendi were complete pricks. They knew they were breaking the law the entire time and still tried to tank Valve, their own asset, instead of just stopping it.
That intern was the hero we needed 🫡
A nice story. I just find it a bit odd that the article says nothing about what became of “Andrew”, the summer intern, whether Valve paid him an appropriate bonus or offered him a job later on.
It seems like an article written purely about info in a documentary, with no original investigation (although I could easily see that they tried at least some, but no one answered)
Proud of mah boy Andrew!
I think we should petition Valve to award that intern Andrew something big, like a million bucks or so, if that hasn’t happened yet! They might just be cool enough to go with it!
Let’s gooo Andrew!!
