At a time when the company is already struggling to come back from a very tough year of getting hammered by their competition, HTC decides to shoot itself in the foot with a PR disaster. Apparently, a legal representative from HTC contacted the owner of HTCRUU.com claiming they were infringing on their copyrights and trademarks, and for the unauthorized hosting of HTC software. HTC then coerced the owner into taking down the site, giving up all of the files (including user-created custom ROMs), and giving up the domain name.
While it is very likely much of HTC's claims were true about copyright and trademark infringement, this is a huge slap in the face to the developer community for HTC devices, and will likely permanently damage that relationship. They could have handled things differently by asking the site owner to clean up the infringing use of logos and clearing out the unlicensed HTC software from the hosting service. Instead, they gave him an ultimatum, and, of course, as a poor developer, he doesn't have the time and money to fight HTC's legal team in court. Thus, he had no recourse but to comply.
Although modders, devs, tweakers and themers are likely a small hardcore subset of fans for mobile devices, and likely make up a fraction of total customers for HTC, the poor word-of-mouth repercussions of this action could be far reaching in a way that HTC hadn't thought through completely. What's really odd is that in the past, for the most part, HTC has left the devs alone and allowed a thriving community to develop. To suddenly smack your best fans in the face like this doesn't make sense, and will likely not have a good outcome. In any circumstance this seems like a bad move for the company, and is doubly bad timing for them. How does this affect your persepctive of HTC?
There are more links and details at the source link below if you want to follow the ensuing drama more closely.
Source: Android Police