At first glance, the amount of damage being done is close to nil — even if they reverse engineer received files to steal trade secrets therein (lol), it is hard to pinpoint specific amount of harm, dealt to the copyright owners.
But actually... why are Facebook people doing that? If I were to wager a guess, Facebook needs those files to create exact copies of user systems to debug. In other words, they are trying to save up on buying real devices for their test lab! Using "pirated" copies of libraries to spin up testing VMs is most likely cheaper than owning lots of real smartphones with all available firmware versions. And also illegal.
I wonder if they gauged possibility of being sued for this along with possible legal expenses and found that it is still cheaper than buying those devices themselves.
At first glance, the amount of damage being done is close to nil — even if they reverse engineer received files to steal trade secrets therein (lol), it is hard to pinpoint specific amount of harm, dealt to the copyright owners.
But actually... why are Facebook people doing that? If I were to wager a guess, Facebook needs those files to create exact copies of user systems to debug. In other words, they are trying to save up on buying real devices for their test lab! Using "pirated" copies of libraries to spin up testing VMs is most likely cheaper than owning lots of real smartphones with all available firmware versions. And also illegal.
I wonder if they gauged possibility of being sued for this along with possible legal expenses and found that it is still cheaper than buying those devices themselves.