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Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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!)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

https://github.com/Andre0512/hon/issues/147#issuecomment-1892738060

So this repo is not going down any time soon.