Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

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)

draughtcyclist,

I see 803 forks currently, keep up the good work!

DeltaTangoLima,
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

Forked, and mirrored to my Foregjo instance

perishthethought,

Oh, good idea! I’m on it.

scrubbles,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

Nooooo I said not to!

BearOfaTime,

Hot damn, there were just a handful at about 5 hours ago when someone else proposed the idea to fork it.

Sing it out, Barbara, let’s get this to the front page of the news!

the_beber,

I hate how cease and desist are essentially blackmail. Even if you did nothing wrong, you can still get fucked over by costs of a potential legal battle.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Honestly its just a symptom of a bigger problem with the justice system entirely.

It has always completely favored those with the most money and lawyers.

possiblylinux127,

That’s the problem of the legal system. You can get acused of a crime falsely but still end up bankrupt and alone.

TWeaK,

It’s a bigger problem in the States than elsewhere. In the US, awarding legal costs is the exception, not the norm, so someone with a lot of money and access to lawyers can basically intimidate a defendent into avoiding court. In the rest of the world, courts are much more likely to award costs to a defendent who has done nothing wrong - if you file a frivilous lawsuit and lose, you’ll probably have to pay the costs of the person you tried to sue.

This guy’s in Germany, so I think he’d be alright if he clearly won. The issue, however, is that courts aren’t really equipped for handling highly technical cases and often get things wrong.

Clubbing4198,

Just downloaded the zips. Fuk haier

possiblylinux127,

I don’t know if there is a non profit to help devs with legal but there should be.

Maybe the Free software conservancy?

JCreazy,

GE has garbage company for a very long time. It’s a shell of its former self. If I’m paying for a product I am going to do whatever I want with it because it’s my money. And if a company has a problem with that, it sounds like the company needs to fix it on their end. If it’s possible to create a plugin that cost your company millions of dollars is obviously you’re not running your company properly.

Deway,

Even their Wikipedia page mentions it, I love it.

scrubbles,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

I don’t know how to edit Wikipedia, but it’d be great if somebody would edit the Streisand effect Wikipedia page to include this

Jozav,

Everybody can send an email to support.hon@haier-europe.com and ask for support of HomeAssistant.

(email address is published on their website hon-smarthome.com under ‘contact us’)

Lifebandit666,

I had 5 minutes so I’ve just sent em a snotty email. I don’t have an air conditioner and won’t buy one anytime soon, but shit like this gets my goat.

qjkxbmwvz,

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court? Obviously I wouldn’t risk it were I the dev, but just curious.

It’s pathetic that I’ll happily recommend my Emporia Vue2 energy monitor to folks running HA — not because it works out of the box, but because the company is aware of the community integration projects and seems ok with it, even if they don’t actually support it. (ESPHome Firmware flash gives you local control — It’s been pretty great!)

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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.

baseless_discourse, (edited )

Likely no, and fortunately the developer has legal insurance and plan to fight the case if it happens.

github.com/Andre0512/hon/issues/147#issuecomment-…

So this repo is not going down any time soon.

FiskFisk33,

This is just plainly not illegal.

ShortN0te,

Sadly it does not matter. The company could keep the battle going for close to a decade until there is a final decision. It is financially draining and you have to give up a lot of time in order to attend the hearings (or even travel to the correct jurisdiction).

fine_sandy_bottom,

That’s not how legal matters work.

Firstly, imposing on someone else’s intellectual property is not “illegal”, because that usually refers to crimes. This is a civil issue, as in the some company is demanding the dev stops or else they’ll sue him or something.

Secondly, it doesn’t really matter whether the dev is “right” or could prevail against a legal claim - because you just wouldn’t bother trying. Imagine you have an ok job, take care of your family, and made this plugin on a whim just because you can. Your days are full of taking your kids to the park, spending time with your wife, playing around with your hobbies, that stuff. Maybe you’re not wealthy, but your salary is enough to look after your family and make your mortgage repayments. Then Haier threatens to sue you, and although you could likely prevail mounting a defense would probably cost you a years worth of mortgage repayments. Maybe you could represent yourself but that might take a years worth of saturdays writing and responding to legal stuff that you don’t really know much about. Bear in mind that there’s no financial support from the open source community.

It just doesn’t really matter whether Haier has a legit claim.

FiskFisk33,

Yeah, you’re right, that’s the problem. That system makes sense if big corpos use it to “test” each other for copyright infringement, but when an individual gets involved they just get steamrolled wether they’re in the right or not, since the system assumes they have a team of lawyers on retainer in order to work as intended.

RalphWolf,

There we go. Haier is now on my personal “do not ever buy from” list. Congratulations, Haier.

jol,

TAKE THIS COMMENT DOWN. YOU’RE CAUSING US GREAT FINANCIAL HARM. MILLIONS!!

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