HTC evidently sends shutdown request to HTCRUU’s ISP
A short while ago, we lost Football’s shipped ROMs and radios collections for reasons unknown, and on Thursday HTCRUU was evidently the subject of a takedown request from HTC according to various sources. JMZ Software’s Twitter feed seems to indicate the ISP received a complaint from HTC, but the full details were not available last week.
Details seem to not be forthcoming or complete, but HTCRUU.com is gone. Other locations to grab your RUUs are Shipped-ROMs.com and the new location for HTCRUU’s files, ruu.androidfiles.com.
While HTC probably filed a complaint based on the HTC portion of HTCRUU’s name, they also may have filed a DMCA request for the distribution of materials they own. HTC has been pretty lax about distribution of Sense-based ROMs and their use among the root crowd, but they do own the rights to the HTC Android Phone ROM Update Utilities programs and how they’re distributed. So they could be attempting to crack down on what they can claim is piracy of their installer.
Evidently, getting these RUUs is not a straightforward process. Even though HTCDEV is there for the appearance of openness to development and developers, these files that restore your phone to a factory condition are not available there, and HTC has been pretty reluctant to release any sort of source code to kernels until the next version of the software comes out. Then again, maybe HTC is just gearing up to serve the files on its own, and it doesn’t want the competition.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. For the end user, this just means that the files are in a different location and there are some unanswered questions from the weekend, possibly due to a lawyer saying “shut up and don’t say anything.”
