HTC has recently set their sites on another ROM repository. This latest is HTCRuu.com and the owner has recently been contacted by lawyers from HTC demanding the site be taken down and the domain name transferred over to them. This all seems to come down to the fact the site was providing ROMs, however the complaints were dealing with trademark infringement and copyrighted material.
More specifically, the trademark infringement side was in regards to the domain name and the copyrighted material side was in regards to the ROMs. A little touch on the back story here, this isn’t the first time that we have seen HTC go after similar sites. But at the same time, there always seems to have been a sort of look the other way feel in regards to these types of sites. The key here though, just because HTC may not have reacted before this, it does not justify what HTCRuu.com was doing.
In fact, details coming from the owner of the website note that he will comply with the requests to not only remove the site and files, but to also transfer the domain name to HTC. In terms of the name, it was even said that in looking at it now he is able to see that “it was a bad choice to pick for the domain name.”
An interesting part here, the HTCRuu site was registered and created several months back — in November 2012. On top of that, the site owner seems to be more puzzled as to why they went after him. Not saying that he was in the right, but that he was nothing more than a “small time Sense ROM developer.” All that being said, we should also point out that HTC is well within their rights to go after sites such as these.
[via Reddit]
just one more reason i will NEVER purchase an HTC
HTC is known for being close in relations to developers. The fact they are going after a domain with the same letter, regardless of their rights, places them close to the same bully category as Apple. HTC and HTCRuu are in it for the same purpose, HTC phones, so why go after a developer that builds custom. roms that go on an HTC phone?
“I want my ball back, you can’t play anymore”
All manufactures seem to have started to take a stance against the development community. I am going to play devils advocate here for a second. Look at the hoops we (ATT) users have to jump through to unlock our bootloaders. Look what verizon and samsung just did to its note 2 users/owners. Look at the recent law passing in America making it (without your carriers consent) illegal to buy an unlock code for your device if bought after a certain date. That just shut down thousands of small business’s who rely on this income to survive. It Seems the manufacturers have given in and gone against the open source theory AndroidTM is based on to satisfy carriers requirements for security. They are ALL not just HTC ALL taking an apple approach. This should not be a shock. Care about 2.5% of your users ( us in the dev world) or cater to the other 97.5% who want a “secure” device on a “secure” network.
To sum up:
There are ways around laws: loopholes. DMCA still allows consumers to unlock their bootloader so they may do as they please with it, but what good is that DMCA if when you try this you brick your device and therefore void your warranty and have to pay full price for another ( smart business for the big guys ) or what good is it when no “officially supported” method is available (ATT HTC One X).
2.5% drop in sells if every dev never bought another phone would hurt up front but companies will recover in the long run.
So unless you buy an officially supported nexus device from Google, I would say in the future good luck trying to dev for the phone you buy on contract via a big carrier.
All this does is make things harder. You cannot stop code and or jailbreaking. There is always a way. Think of Anonymous. There is always a way, dev will go on, we will continue to gripe in the end all this means is more bricked phones and more money.
You sure we’re not talking about Apple? Sounds very Cupertino’ish of them.