Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharpneli | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t this potentially a copyright violation?

Especially on Qualcomm devices (such as the Jolla phone) Qualcomm explicitly forbids you from distributing their OpenGL drivers. So if facebook copies libGLESv2.so off from the device they are potentially performing straight piracy at that point.

If I recall the damages demanded by RIAA it was several hundred k per infringement.

View on HN

They don't upload the library just their filename and hash. Probably for bug troubleshooting, device fingerprinting and feature availability data. It's a bit much, device fingerprinting like this should get you banned from the play store. However there are legitimate uses for this.

They're uploading the actual binary as well: https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1167463077748436993

Qualcomm v Facebook. If there was ever a fight where neither party deserves to win (or survive), this is it!

I read that wrong. you're right.

> If I recall the damages demanded by RIAA it was several hundred k per infringement.

I don't think they care for it. They already paid a $5B fine

The exact details would depend on what they do with the uploads and the specific countries they're uploaded to/from. I'd presume they do this for security and debugging purposes, not to 'steal' the libraries. Like a virus company uploading samples of 'suspicious' .dlls for analysis, this looks like a fair use exception.

It's not a fair use exception because Facebook is not the party involved in the copyright agreement. They're a completely separate third party so they don't have any rights at all to those files.

This is a good point. And in EU interoperability is explicit reason for not just this but full fledged reverse-engineering.

Even if it is, Qualcomm won't do anything about it. It's in their interest that FB app works well on Snapdragon.

Why would it be? They are not redistributing the library.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com