In my experience lawyers are very conservative about this. I can believe that's the advice they're getting, but it's obviously not the full story. According to the eff[0] (article starts with some discussion irrelevant to this case).

"The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited. Genericide occurs when a trademark becomes the standard term for a type of good (‘zipper’ and ‘escalator’ being two famous examples). This is very rare and would not be a problem for Canonical unless people start saying “Ubuntu” simply to mean “operating system.” Courts also set a very high bar to show abandonment (usually years of total non-use). Importantly, failure to enforce a mark against every potential infringer does not show abandonment.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...

Yeah, I get it, there is a much larger context here wrt. trademark laws, etc. Still from azer's point of view he is absolutely correct. He's being screwed over by business interests and receiving no protection from npm. Surely there are other solutions that resolve the legal requirement for kik to defend their trademark without requiring that particular repository name to be surrendered.

So yeah, it's a bigger problem than just npm. All the more reason for azer to decide to leave npm. Obviously there is nothing in place to prevent this kind of abuse in the future so why continue to participate?

They don't need to use legal force - they could just license the name to him.

why would they do that? their concern was that a user might be confused over the names. they were interested in exclusive rights to the name, not in getting paid a token amount so someone else could use it.

To avoid strong-arming open source developer and avoiding the PR fallout? With great lawyer power comes great responsibility to your PR.