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HTC slaps ROM distributor with cease-and-desist order

While most HTC customers are simply satisfied to buy their handset and wait for HTC to roll out their own updates, there’s a fairly large community of developers and hackers who devote a lot of their time to tweaking and rereleasing  ROMS for HTC handsets.  HTC has always a little quiet on the whole topic since they know that the ROM development for the fan community helps retain a lot of their customers and keeps quite a few people busy until they can get around to rolling out their official ROM updates to their Windows Mobile and Android phones.  But it looks like ROM distributor might be out of the game for a bit.  Conflipper, who runs shipped-roms.com, has just received a cease-and-desist letter from HTC.  While most ROM cooks take HTC’s build, tweak them, add their own twist, and share them with the comminute, Conflipper’s site was known more for hosting official ROM builds from HTC.  While we’re still waiting to hear back from HTC on the matter, Engadget was able to get a short statement from them.

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.

For now, it doesn’t look like HTC will be going after the developer community, just those who are hosting and distributing HTC’s official ROM builds.  Let the cooking continue!

Source: Shipped-ROMs

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  1. We’re putting together a website to sell some of the best Android tablets we’ve sourced out of China – it’s really amazing what’s going on there with Android development out here, and I constantly find odd phones that appear to be running Android with all sorts of ROM configurations – a lot of which appear to come from HTC.

    We’re reaching out and working with the ROMchef community to help us develop working ROMs with non-conflicting license issues and offering a profit-share relationship for their contributions – perhaps this could alleviate one of the core problems with the Android business model in terms of allowing the open-source community to drive hardware production and truly exploit the low-cost advantages offered by a no-barriers open-source mobile operating system (which is, what I think got us all excited about Android in the first place).

  2. We love HTC and they have supported developers for years. Thats what makes this a little surprising. That said corporation have rules and they seem to have some not everyone knew about.

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