What on earth are Mazda doing, someone need to educate them about software. Also it’s ironic that this integration was even better than the official app (which is a disaster)
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This is what happens when legal reps try and use grey areas of the law to issue DMCA notices, and generally they’ll have no idea what they are actually looking at apart from “oh this replicates some functionality we built in our app, so it must mean its copied our code.”
While I don’t own a Mazda, I do hope that this integration is restored with an appeal.
I hope it’s due to a mutual agreement between nabu and Mazda.
I think that it is likely that HA/bdr99 could find pro bono legal representation for this issue
I’m sorry, but it ain’t happening and I support what the maintainer has done here. I also look after an integration for a particular car model and were I in a similar position to the maintainer of the Mazda integration, I would do exactly as they have done. No way am I risking my career, family and well-being on something I do in my spare time to help other people out. Not even close to being worth it.
That being said, if they did go legal on me, I would make sure that as many people knew about it and, almost certainly, it would make me change car (HA integration is, IMHO, essential with EVs, for example). I think it would be safe to say that noone currently using a Mazda with HA would entertain buying another one in the future, so it’s astonishingly short sighted.
I hope that a bit of noise made here might make them reconsider but, hey, if not there are plenty of other cars out there that work just fine with HA 
and I’m sure the HA community will spread the word enthusiastically that Mazda have not got their customers’ best interests at heart.
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Looks like the integration has already been removed from Home Assistant analytics, but the Internet Archive has a recent backup. On Oct 3, there were 227 instances that had this integration set up with analytics turned on.
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As a Mazda owner, I’m deeply disappointed in Mazda itself about this DCMA takedown.
I used this frequently to ensure there was enough gas in the car (early morning commute and a shared car), alerts to see the windows are up before rain is supposed to arrive, remote unlocking to avoid a long hike back to the car when I left the keys inside, and remote starting as the weather starts to get colder (again, early morning commutes).
Their app is a poor implementation at best.
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I am too a Mazda owner, and I am very disappointed in their move. I did read through the DMCA takedown, and I fail to see how their Apple and Android apps are infringing on the Python-based library. It’s not the same code base at all. The code that “provides functionality same as what is currently in Apple App Store and Google Play App Store” is NOT a copyright infringement! I can’t believe GitHub didn’t even read the takedown itself.
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Another disappointed Mazda owner. I and my family have purchased 3 in recent years. I sent a message to Mazda in their app, telling how much they have disappointed this customer and encouraged them to reach out to the Home Assistant team as there is a mutual benefit to both.
I encourage others to send a message telling Mazda North America how you feel. It’s simple to do in their app. Maybe we all can help them see their mistake.
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It would be nice if Wired or Arstechinca would pick up this for bigger publicity.
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Yeah unfortunately if the person who posted the code doesn’t “counter-notice” and if the host of the code doesn’t push back and say “your request doesn’t meet the requirements for a dmca takedown”, then companies will continue to get away with abusing these takedowns. Unfortunately the costs and anxiety of “no I’m actually in the right here” are born by the individual dev not the massive corporation.
And yeah replicating functionality is not copyright infringement. Kind of disappointed that the GitHub process is so lax that there wasn’t more pushback. There was obviously some, since there was the mention that this was a revised request. But like, they didn’t identify any actual content copied…
But I know the host has pretty limited push back abilities under the law. If there is actually no copied code, I would have hoped for a counter notice (which puts it back up and it’s then on the complainer to prove more thoroughly) but I totally understand it would be intimidating.
(Not a lawyer obviously.)
Reach out and complain, car buyers and Mazda owners.
Bizarre decision on their part, and a good reason for me to avoid buying a car from them.
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Looks like you can still download pymazda from pypi using the direct links:
https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/6f/39/148a82a2f38cf770cf943482cf051af60d2aae607b5194260ec027d7ff0e/pymazda-0.3.11-py3-none-any.whl
https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/c8/98/6da75ea926e4b3566823fcf164114b932d9c4de915e1412f1e0fa016ab58/pymazda-0.3.11.tar.gz
I doubt this will get added. Integrations are supposed to have an external library, which you have done away with.
At what address can we write to them to complain? If there are thousands of us this could change!
I also find this an absurdity and have reported it to a well-known German electronics blog. Perhaps the topic gets thereby again somewhat more range and the pressure on the responsible persons with Mazda increases.
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I noticed a potential licensing issue when it comes to relying only on an external package source host like pypi.
If home-assistant receives a GPL source code request(for example due to many of the libraries in the home-assistant docker images being GPL licensed) wouldn’t the source code to all library dependencies(including the source for historical dependencies like pymazda) need to be provided for 3 years(due to the combined home-assistant application effectively falling under GPL requirements) from the date of distribution of the docker image?
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I wouldn’t be surprised if this company would not be the reason of this whole issue:
It must be hurtful if somebody uses a service in a way that it can be efficient and useful and mostly for FREE as it is open-source.
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