No it isn't; and he made that clear, he objects to their actions and is taking action of his own.
> Last but not least, whining about it in public in the hope "something will happen" is pathetic.
No, it's called protesting, and it's exactly the correct thing to do. Calling it pathetic is itself pathetic.
> hat I'd suggest (though now it is too late): Rename the module to comply with legal claims, put up a new module under the old name that throws errors when called that describe the reason so developers see it and put shame on the threatening company/lawyers.
You're completely missing his point if you think this suggestion is at all reasonable.
Is this the kik we're talking about?
http://dev.kik.com/ https://trademarks.justia.com/858/93/kik-85893307.html
Is the point that kik should just give up on their company trademark?
Agreed - hence why I looked up the actual trademark in the first place. I wasn't expecting to find out they were in the software development business too.
> See the 8 factors of trademark infringement
I'm assuming these? (Google turned up 1 hit - which in turn was 404ed - for "8 factors of trademark infringement") http://www.bitlaw.com/trademark/infringe.html#factors
Keeping in mind IANAL:
1. The marks appear very similar, with the possible exception that kik the company appears to have no meaning behind "kik". Similar enough that I have to specify "kik the company." 2. Both appear to provide services aimed at developers. 3. The plaintiff's mark appears to be strong enough to fill the first page of Google, and for overprotective parents to overreact to. 4. I was momentarily confused which kik I was clicking through to at least once.
Am I misweighing or misinterpreting things to think that the first 3 points, at least, point towards infringement? Do you agree that these appear to be among the more important ones?
"The first five of these factors are examined in every trademark infringement action." "Of these eight factors, the first two are arguable the most important."
> ... and trademark law in general
If you have any recommendations, feel free to share.
It's not good that NPM-the-piece-of-infrastructure is vulnerable to this, maybe a registry like this shouldn't be under control of a single company, but we don't know enough to decide what options NPM Inc-the-company had.
I hope they clean up/better communicate their policies around this, once they have them figured out (e.g. the package dispute page doesn't discuss trademarks).
Not given them control over his code just because it had their name on it. They could have taken it down, but they didn't, they just gave some company ownership of his module, not cool.
You can't possibly think that's the point he's making. Did you even bother to read the article?
Protesting trademark law sounds like a lot of useless fun. It may be the "correct" thing to do, but it will have no result.
A knee jerk reaction is an immediate unthinking emotional reaction; when you detail out your thought process in a lengthy well articulated blog post to explain your actions, it isn't knee jerk by definition. There was nothing at all unthinking about his actions or his protest. Point in fact, when someone explains to you why something isn't a knee jerk reaction, it automatically isn't. His making it clear has an approximately 100% relationship to the fact that it isn't.
Is this a joke? In the world of hilariously over litigious rich companies crushing people with the threat of lawsuits? If you don't have the balls to defend your company vs patent trolls shut the fuck up? Hahaha.
I have dealt with a few such problems myself and more often than not a simple counter demand that the other party should substantiate their claim was enough to make the claim go away.
And this is not even a multi-billion dollar patent troll - it was merely about a trademark, which every lawyer should be able to check in 30 minutes.
Are you serious?
>Seriously
What legal basis is there that NPM packages are subject to trademark, or other law?
NPM takes its names from the package.json file. The law has no say over what one may put into their package.json file.
>I couldn't make an open source word processor and call it "Microsoft Word".
Sure you could, you just couldn't use it in commerce.
Why not? An NPM package name is the name of a piece of software, and software names are very much covered under trademark law.
> There are no legal claims to be made over NPM package names.
a) Ignorance is no excuse.
b) Expecting others to fight for one is lame. Either have the balls and fight or STFU.
"Summary; NPM is no longer a place that I’ll share my open source work at, so, I’ve just unpublished all my modules. This is not a knee-jerk action."
Wrong, that is the prototype of a knee-jerk action.
Last but not least, whining about it in public in the hope "something will happen" is pathetic.
What I'd suggest (though now it is too late): Rename the module to comply with legal claims, put up a new module under the old name that throws errors when called that describe the reason so developers see it and put shame on the threatening company/lawyers.