James Taylor (not the famed singer of "Fire and Rain" but the founder of JMZ Software) tweeted yesterday that HTC sent him an email demanding that he take down all of the custom ROMs he had stored on htcruu.com (which has since been shut down), indicating that HTC's problem wasn't simply with the use of the HTC trademark in the domain name.
In a reddit post containing the content of the alleged email discussion between him and HTC's lawyer, the HTC lawyer is quoted as saying "On the ROM front, HTC does not endorse or allow distribution of its ROMs by any third party." The alleged HTC legal representative (referred to as "Matt" in the email discussion) went so far as to ask, "If you are aware of any third party sites providing ROMs that HTC should know about, please do let me know - it would be very helpful." Hmmm... XDA-Developers and RootzWiki come to mind, as do Android Central forums, DroidForums, ... (I trust you get my point
).I see little reason to expect HTC to actually send cease-and-desist letters to RootzWiki, XDA-Developers et al. but this is still rather disturbing news. I should also point out that HTC is well within its legal rights to crack down on the distribution of Sense-based ROMs because Sense is a proprietary Android skin and developers and/or ROM chefs are not legally entitled to modify and redistribute apps or ROMs based on it. However, this goes against HTC's traditional development-friendly (or at least tolerant) policies (though they did crack down on another unauthorized firmware site back in 2010).
Here's a quote posted by Engadget regarding the past action against a site called "Shipped ROMs" below:
While HTC tries to take a hands off [approach] about the modder / ROM chef community, this site's sole purpose [is] to make HTC's content available for download from a source other than HTC. That content is not just the open source parts and kernels of Android but all of the software that HTC itself has developed. This is a clear violation of our copyrights and HTC needs to defend itself in these cases.
- HTC, in reply to Engadget's request for comment on a cease-and-desist letter to "Shipped ROMs
I should also point out that HTC is apparently concerned (as well it should be) that harm could come to end users when they install unauthorized distributions of HTC's ROMs (and that the blame for this harm could be laid at HTC's feet unjustly). To be sure, there are many third-party sites out there actually distributing poorly-hacked unauthorized versions of Sense ROMs and/or apps, and these files could cause serious damage to your phone (not to mention the malware potential). However, there is absolutely no evidence indicating that JMZ Software or htcruu.com had any of such dangerous firmware. In fact, there's no reason to think the files there were any more dangerous than the ones posted here or at XDA-Developers.
To be blunt, however, I don't think HTC is terribly concerned about heavily modified Sense-based ROMs. I suspect that HTC is more concerned about unauthorized distributions of stock firmware, especially of pre-release test builds (though the lawyer apparently demanded that seven custom ROMs be taken down from James Taylor's androidfiles.org site as well). James Taylor told me there were no pre-release builds on htcruu.com - only post-release versions with HTC internal codenames like "Supersonic" (Evo 4G) or "Vivow" (Droid Incredible 2), etc. that HTC's lawyer mistakenly interpreted to be pre-release due to the codenames being included in the file names.
