552
Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm not really big on "let's make a movement", but this independent dev has been hit with a cease-and-desist from making a FOSS Home Assistant addon for their Haier air conditioners.

Haier claims that they are losing out on millions of dollars due to this plugin which... lets you control their air conditions from home assistant. They haven't bothered to explain how that's possibly worth millions of dollars - they're just claiming it.

So of course they hit the Streisand button and are demanding that he takes it down. He of course is complying... in a couple of days. Maybe you see where this is going.

It would be an absolute shame if any of you just happened to create a fork, or clone the code, or mirror it in your own instance. An absolute shame.

Just so everyone here knows which repositories NOT to clone or fork, here are the two links:

and please, don't repost this anywhere, or share it in other communities, or anything like that. It's a shame that so many people already know and are making clones. I'm just letting you know so you don't do anything like telling others who may make their own copies.

(sidenote: Haier owns GE Appliance, so for our American folks it may affect you folks too)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] dan@upvote.au 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court?

I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think so.

The developer of this Home Assistant integration is German. European law allows people to reverse engineer apps for the purpose of interoperability (Article 6 of the EU software directive), so observation of the app's behaviour or even disassembling it to create a Home Assistant integration is not illegal.

In general, writing your own code by observing the inputs to and outputs from an existing system is not illegal, which is for example how video game emulators are legal (just talking about the emulator code itself, not the content you use with it).

If it's a Terms of Service violation, it'd be the users that are violating the ToS, not the developer. In theory, the Home Assistant integration could have been developed without ever running the app or agreeing to Haier's Terms of Service, for example if the app is decompiled and the API client code is viewed (which again is allowed by the EU software directive if the sole purpose is for interoperability).

The code in this repo is likely original Python code that was written without using any of Haier's code and without bypassing any sort of copy protection, so it's not a DMCA infringement either.

this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
552 points (99.1% liked)

Selfhosted

40415 readers
359 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz