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)

  • @NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10•5 months ago

    But the defendant still has to put the funds up in the first place? It’s a huge gamble

    Good point. Actually it isn’t a huge gamble in Germany, other than in Usa (which is again the extremely worst example).

    Costs of legal defense are moderate. There is a public tariff for lawyer costs and for court fees. So the only areas where you even have a chance to spend huge amounts are finding or creating evidence (private investigators etc), or hiring too many lawyers.

    • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺English
      9•5 months ago

      The problem is that it can still work in Germany to just pile the defendant under too many files to process with his ressources. This is not the case in stuff that courts understand, like say a traffic accident. But for anything technical/IT/IP related German courts are terribly incompetent and unable to create a fair case.

      Especially regarding IP related things like streaming or torrenting movies, there is a myriad of ridiculous court decisions. The default unfortunately seems to be to just assume the corporation to be in the right, because it is a corporation and surely they must own the IP and lose a lot of money from the evil hackers.

      • @NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2•5 months ago

        It is not “the” problem.

        It is thinkable in theory, but it is not a normal thing to happen. Also, you would not just “drown” the defendant, but the court as well, and then they may smell the misuse.

        • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺English
          3•5 months ago

          There is criminal, not civil courts, that were sucessfully drowned in the cum-ex robberies. They gave up on prosecuting people who stole billions from the federal budget, because they were unable to process the amount of files brought by the defense, before the statue of limitations expires.

          So if even prosecuting theft of billions of Euros is subject to this tactic smaller civil cases can be too. And the court, because of their lack of technical understanding struggle to assess which files are relevant and which aren’t.

    • density
      2•5 months ago

      It seems that hourly rates of german lawyers are €100 to €500 which is about what I would expect. Even a few hours of time is a lot. To explain the case, have the lawyer or their designate review it, prepare for a case and show up to court is many hours at a minimum. Even if it is a simple matter.