I for one wholeheartedly support him. The more collateral damage he causes, the more people are awareness he raises. While the solution to his problem is unclear at this point, it'll at least get us talking, and find out what all of the stakeholders can do better next time, and we as a community to prevent this from ever happening again. I entirely supports his actions.

"awareness". Awareness of what? His trademark infringement?

Imagine this from the perspective of a hypothetical user. He's cranky and on a tight deadline, and suddenly his project is broken because some dumb dependency three layers away that he's never even heard of broke because some guy decided to throw a tantrum, and now his software is broken and he has to emergency rewrite part of it. All because this guy didn't bother to check if "kik" was a name he was allowed to use.

> "awareness". Awareness of what? His trademark infringement?

Alleged trademark infringement. Since his project was unrelated to Kik's business, it is questionable whether it was actually trademark infringement or over-zealous lawyers.

What if left-pad was trademarked? It's not the developer who decided to throw a tantrum, the lawyers of this company did.

Awareness of how fragile npm is, both in terms of trusting it to always be available for your deploy but also on the mutability of packages there. What if someone unpublished one single well used package and someone else snapped it up to publish malicious code, it could have taken months before somebody noticed.

You missed part of the story. From the article, it sounds like npm decided to play the "We're a private company" card and was threatening to take control away from him, so he decided to disassociate himself from them. And because of the way npm's system works, this broke other packages and the new maintainers had difficulty fixing the problems.

Bleh, involving brand names or trademarks or whatever on a library that doesn't even seem to be commercial is a pretty dick move to begin with.

And his protest is against npm, who allowed someone to appropriate his work. The users are collateral damage, but really, can you blame the guy? Given the circumstances, urging users to ditch npm isn't a bad idea.

The thing about trademarks is if you fail to defend them, they can be considered "weak" and you can lose your rights to it. If you have a trademark and it's important to you, it's in your best interest to defend it so you don't lose it. It doesn't matter if it's a "dick" move or not, or if the infringement was non-commercial, he was messing with their trademark, and if they want to keep it they have to actively defend it.

[Oops, see the correction at the bottom]

Re: the common refrain that always pops up with these stories about how companies are "forced" to defend their trademarks lest they lose control of them

The issue I have with this argument is that, while I accept that it's largely true that once you try to obtain a trademark in a given domain that you have to defend it, nothing is forcing anyone to overbroadly define the reach of their trademark. Kik is a mobile communication app company without a household name, whose name is an obvious web2.0 style construction (so not unlikely to be replicated by chance) who asserts that their trademark applies to the entire software industry[1]. Kik elected to enter that difficult to defend position, and that's a common decision among companies that get negative press for overaggressively asserting trademarks. These companies are culpable for the social impact of their strategic decisions, and so I have no issue with blaming them for the results.

Asserting a not particularly creative trademark like Kik for the entire software industry was an aggressive stance in the first place, so I don't think that the apparent fact that you can't let competitors blatantly use your trademark without defending it absolves them of culpability here.

When you try to defend a trademark against a tiny, not-for-profit non-competitor, you come off as an entitled bully. Companies should take that into consideration when staking out their trademark territory. It works for some (Trump's hard to avoid here, and at one point it looked like Palantir was using the "I don't care if people don't like me" thing to great gain), but if that's not the DNA of your company, then you should consider whether you're biting off more than you can chew in your trademark assertions. If you can handle the heat of that kind of aggression, then more power to you, but don't come crying about how you are obligated to defend your unreasonably aggressive initial position when you get a little negative press.

[1] Which is almost a misnomer. The software industry is more of a meta industry that touches essentially every other industry these days. This underscores just how aggressive a claim it is that a given trademark covers the entire software industry. It's essentially saying that undue market confusion would result if the name were used for a mobile game, a text editor, an aerospace software testing product, an ETF platform, a medical devices operating system, an animations library, or even a platform for programming robotic legs to kick nearby objects [which would obviously be a more suitable home for the trademark of the identifier 'Kik' :D ]

[edit: grammar]

[correction: @overgard: Jeez, I meant to transfer this comment to a top level comment, because there's nothing wrong with your comment here, it's just related to a sentiment that has seemed to be subtly off to me for a while in a way that I couldn't put my finger on. Reading your comment just kicked off that old thought process that has been churning in my mind for a while.

I didn't intend to tee off on this specific comment, because I really don't have any problems with this specific comment, the aspects that I'm complaining about are really outside the scope of what you are saying.

But now that I know that I forgot to transfer it to a new comment window, and instead responded in this thread, the beginning, which was meant to represent a stronger general argument, looks condescending to me (inaccurately generalizing someone's comment in direct response to them? Ugh... that is sooo not what I was going for). This wasn't at all my intention, and I'm really sorry if it gives that impression. I apologize for any confusion or negativity that the error may have caused.]

Aren't trademarks only relevant to products or services?

This was what I was thinking while reading the post.

Also, I recently checked and https://github.com/tylertreat/comcast is still alive and well.

kik.com is a product/service. kik the library is a product/service.

Hey since you love authority, you realize that NPM decided to change the ownership of the kik module without asking his permission right? Life isn't black and white.

Yes if you start from the axiomatic base that the earth is flat, a lot of people around you are starting to sound awfully silly.

Then you realize that if your assumptions are wrong, any conclusion from them is valid.