Valve Urges Court to Keep Its Confidential Information Under Seal

Virtual-reality company Valve, a nonparty to the FTC’s litigation to block Meta’s Within Unlimited buy (see 2210140002), wants the U.S. District Court for Northern California in San Jose to maintain under seal the “highly confidential material” in the reports of two Meta expert witnesses, Dennis Carlton and Michael Zyda, said the company’s statement Friday (docket 5:22-cv-04325). Portions of both reports contain nonpublic R&D and business information regarding Valve’s “continuing development of its VR technology and products,” it said. Disclosure of this information “could cause competitive harm to Valve by revealing Valve’s R&D and business strategies to competitors in the VR hardware market, thus undercutting Valve’s position in the marketplace,” it said. Valve “does not disclose or share this information outside the company, particularly to any competitor,” it said. The company “has expended significant resources and implemented strict measures to prevent disclosure of the confidential information” contained in the expert reports, “including by storing such information under password protection on internal Valve servers, limiting access to certain of the information described above to certain Valve employees with a specific need to know, and not making such information publicly available.”