HTC’s lingering legal threat against the root community resolved
The lingering threat of takedown requests for any privately hosted Sense-based ROMs, or prosecution for hosting RUUs, seems to have been cleared up. The short answer is: yes, you can host RUUs and custom ROMs, and HTC has no problems with this.
More details came to light that the lawyer who sent the takedown requests for the RUUs was under the impression that money was changing hands for the transfer of these to end users. JMZ Software also supposedly had a pre-release ROM on the site, which was a no-no in HTC’s eyes, as it was a non-released product.
HTC is looking into hosting all the released RUUs themselves, but does not have a timeframe, so for now you can head over to ruu.androidfiles.org and get them with HTC’s blessings. You can’t get the pre-released or unreleased HTC ROMs, but that’s not really anything to worry about.
For the not-so-important-to-root-community things, which were the only ones that HTC made a statement about, HTCRUU.com is now HTC’s domain, and JMZ will not use their logos.
It’s still a shame it takes multiple websites, constant requests, and 11 days of emails before the community can get an answer from HTC, which evidently came about after a conference call with James Taylor of JMZ software this morning. This is the sort of thing that should have been cleared up in one or two emails.
[RootzWiki]
