HTC Looking To Shut Down Phone Firmware Site

Some of you might be familiar by a person who goes by the name Confipper on the internet, he is a man who has earned a reputation by tearing apart ROMs, often for unreleased devices and then pulling out unique information for people to see. He runs a site called Shipped ROMs with a bunch of well ... shipped ROMs for a wide variety of phones on it, and it seems HTC in Taiwan have taken an issue with it. They are saying that they have "very strong reasons to believe that the HTC Intellectual Property was illegally obtained by fraudulent means" in a strongly-worded cease and desist letter sent to him earlier today. HTC's US branch released the following comment:

"While HTC tries to take a hands off [approach] about the modder / ROM chef community, this site's sole purpose [is] to make HTC's content available for download from a source other than HTC. That content is not just the open source parts and kernels of Android but all of the software that HTC itself has developed. This is a clear violation of our copyrights and HTC needs to defend itself in these cases."

Basically HTC is just not for official ROMs being hosted on unofficial servers. The issue here is that anyone can dump a ROM from a phone and flesh it out, so we can't imagine that there's any competitive concern and no first-party site makes so many firmware builds available for so many devices in such a concise and well organized way as Shipped ROMs. At the end of the day, its HTC's property and it seems like they are probably in the legal right here but the bad public relations effect with some of the companies enthusiasts make the whole situation a bit more troubling that it's probably worth.