HTC Hub in France, bought a black market HTC One S prototype and wrote about it before it was officially released. The pre-review unit has been seized by French authorities from editor Bruno Miguel.
HTC has started legal proceedings. When a pre-release iPhone prototype was found and in a bar and sold Apple started legal proceedings very quickly and eventually found the culprit, Brian Hogan who apologized.
Meanwhile here in the United States, we don't have release dates for the HTC One X (AT&T) or HTC One S(T-Mobile) that are rumored to be in the end of April or early May.
The process of the media obtaining review units is that we usually have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and agree to an embargo about when to write about the review unit.
HTC Hub claims it had to buy the HTC One S because it couldn't get one from HTC''s PR company Hopsotch until April.
HTC claims that it contacted HTC Hub several time sto get the HTC One S, but the website refused to return the product.
HTC Hub in turn claims that HTC never contacted it directly and has done nothing wrong.
HTC Hub claims to have bought the an HTC One S from a ‘confidential source’ and was not aware of an embargo after it bought it and wrote about it.
If they would have known about the embargo beforehand, it wouldn’t have purchased the prototype.
HTC wants to keep it intellectual property while HTC Hub obviously wants to jump other sources to HTC One X S punch.