In response to a threat starting with "We don’t mean to be a dick about it" and ending with "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that", I did say "fuck you" to Kik.
If that makes me the character in your mind, enjoy your imagination.
And he did offer them a solution: $30,000 dollars, to which they promptly - albeit indirectly - replied with fuck you.
We must pursue our trademarks or risk losing them. We must. So can we make this amicable instead of hostile?
The maintainer could have requested things like "Okay can I make some blog posts and you help me with some SEO to make sure people are aware of the changes to my project name?" etc. Sounds like Kik was willing to be reasonable and help where they could. Clearly they could have gone in with an opening statement saying "this is the lawyer, I am sending trademark takedown notices, fuck you, go to hell" but they clearly did not.
This is one person trying to make the best of an awkward situation, and one person just saying "duces".
If he was releasing a messenger app called KikAss, then sure, they “must” enforce the Kik trademark.
But if I release a brand of shoes called Kik, with an api that allows users to poll how many steps a user has taken that day, that’s not a trademark violation.
Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they could be unintentionally confusing (for example, if Kik has been talking about releasing shoes for a while or if it’s a well known brand of soccer balls).
Neither of these things have occurred, so the trademark doesn’t have to go through a (futile) enforcement process.
Not long ago I was involved in a company that defended their trademark. The other group said to us 'f- you' and refused to comply. They then continued to do marketing and interviews with our brand name and an almost identical logo. It's like they were trying to dig a hole.
So that behaviour actually just created more evidence of infringement. We contacted their partners and explained the situation and they started pulling their support. They lost half their board members. So eventually their own lawyer said "Hey guys, we really should comply." and that was it.
No money exchanged hands and we only dropped 30k into a lawyer. I assume they sunk money into rebranding, lawyers, new partners, and a whole bunch of things because they were being petty.
No, they don't, only probability of customer confusion.
Criminal counterfeiting charges require intent, IIRC.
> or they could be unintentionally confusing [to the customer]
> Trademark violations require intent to mislead, or they do not require intent to mislead.
You are trying to assert that this makes sense and that the second half makes the first half correct. Neither is true.
——
The sentence reduces to “trademark violations are considered to have taken place regardless of when there is either an intention to mislead or if a customer was unintentionally misled.”
If the grammar was poop and you can’t make a good faith reading of it (to go so far as to follow me around on this post) then by all means feel free to comment away but I won’t be responding to it.
How do you know unintentional confusion did not occur?
Is this a legal requirement?
The next sentence also goes on to say that either one of those two needs to take place - again, referencing more than one way a trademark violation could take place.
Maybe my English wasn't clear. English isn't my first or my most recent language, so my grammar sometimes goes a bit funky.
The sentence taken as a whole does not make the wrong part right. That you think we must not have noticed the rest of the sentence demonstrates that you don't know why it is wrong. You are choosing to get defensive instead of accepting a correction to your grammar that you acknowledge as being funky.
> Maybe my English wasn't clear.
What is the effective difference between your English being unclear and the correction being written in a way that makes it wrong?
> Using another's trademark in a way that has nothing to do with the product or service for which the trademark was granted is not a trademark policy violation.
Many people think that if you have a trademark, you have to sue everyone who uses your name no matter what capacity they're using it in, which doesn't seem to be the case. If their usage is unrelated to yours, you have no authority to prevent them from using it however they want.
There are some exceptions to this, like the American Red Cross's logo of a red cross on a white background (nobody is allowed to use this except the red cross in any context, although it isn't always enforced) [1].
[0]: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...
[1]: https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2012/04/one-cr...
And that's where it definitely stops, but people get carried away and imagine now if Alice tells Bob, "Enough, I need you to stop doing X by this reasonable time" and Bob says "Fuck you Alice" and keeps doing X the court will rule for Bob. Nope. And they imagine Bob's friend Charlie might show up too, and do X and Alice has to accept that because she told Bob previously it was fine, again Nope. As a result some businesses become convinced that unless they pay lawyers to threaten every hobby project starting with the same first letter as their product the terrible "estoppel" will destroy their business.
Also just as a general principle lawyers are for avoiding disputes first, fixing existing disputes as a last resort. If you're actively paying lawyers to start shit you are probably Doing It Wrong™.
> and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them.
They aren't threatening him for the fun of it, this is classic trademark stuff.
Also the "solution" he offered them was:
> Yeah, you can buy it for $30.000 for the hassle of giving up with my pet project for bunch of corporate dicks
Would _you_ give this guy $30,000, after he calls you a dick multiple times and tells you in no uncertain terms to fuck off?
No one comes out looking good in this interaction, don't get me wrong, but Azer was super unprofessional and nasty during those interactions. He gets no sympathy from me.
It’s “classic trademark stuff” insofar that people classically don’t understand what a trademark is or how it’s enforced.
Consider reading through Github’s policy on trademarks[0] to better understand why a casual fuck off should be given whenever you get misleading, threatening emails.
[0] https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-tradema...
And just because it's a lawyer does not make things better. If you want me to cooperate, try to be nice. If you threat me, don't be surprise to hear a 'fuck you'.
Does he even have to be “professional“? Even though two of the parties involved happen to be corporations, he owes no allegiance to them and the exchange does not take place in a corporate context. I mean, we are talking about corporate overreach, why should we be assessing his words by corporate standards? “Professional” usually means “don’t show emotions and suck up the abuse”. I’m glad he was both showing his protest and standing up to the overreach.
Can others judge him harshly for said decision? Yes.
There was a time when hacker culture was associated with rebellious and playful values. Such an irony on Hacker News we are discussing if he should be penalized for saying “bad words” in the face of corporate unfairness.
I’d say they made a logical decision.
In any event, escalating - even when you think the other party is being a dick - is never the right answer.
If you're hiring a lawyer off a television commercial in order to make a quick buck off of a fender bender. Corporate law is different.
And as an attorney, if I go back into practice someday, of course I’ll do the same.
You're lucky you were treated as nicely as you were. It could have been a whole lot worse.
Lessons learned:
1. Hire an attorney when you get a takedown notice if you think you are likely to decline, and seek counsel before responding.
2. Telling people "fuck you" doesn't get you anywhere, and it doesn't matter how impolite or wrong you think the other person is.
That's essentially what the lawyers at my friend's company told them as well, as they're dealing with a similar problem. Just because you have lawyers doesn't mean the answer will be any different; you very likely won't be able to deal with a lawsuit from a much larger company.
If anything, it made me feel both unwise and ignorant, so I addressed that by going to law school and passing the bar. I have a great career and I keep my nose clean.
I also have a different perspective now - one of the creator instead of the consumer. And I disagree that Goliath always has to win. Sometimes the big guy is wrong; and thank goodness we have folks like EFF to help out when they abuse their wealth and power. When the little guy is on the right side of the argument, I will also stand up for them.
Keep in mind, too, that Kik doesn't exactly have overflowing pockets. They can barely pay their bills and nearly shut down last year.
You seem to want us to question the narrative based on the likability of the developer, but is it really relevant? Can you really imagine a data point that we don't know that will change the narrative of "solo developer getting steamrolled by corporate machinery"? Because that is what is happening in both cases. I want to be clear, this is not even about the solo developer actually being in the right, it is about the process or lack thereof that takes place to reach the conclusion. You might not like this particular guy, but I guarantee you a more likable guy would be/will be/is being equally strong-armed in these lopsided processes. Transparency, accountability and fairness would make all of us happy and not left guessing who might be right based on who writes the most likable emails or has the most popular brand.
So while his "likeability" is completely irrelevant, how else would we even hear about these issues if he didn't make a big fuss about it? I think that also might explain why we heard of this story twice from the same developer. The truth is people face similar issues every day but no one hears about it. I'm glad that some people kick up a lot of dust and make the issue visible to everyone.
Developers are often pushovers (no disrespect, I'm often one myself). Anyone who isn't gets passive aggressively labeled with terms that make them easy to conflate with actually bad people.
Give 'em hell, Azer.
Per my anecdotal experience, they are really good at choosing the outcome that benefits them the most/harms them the least - which wouldn't upset me since most companies do this, but it's Npm's "we're here for the community" type of fake attitude that has always bothered me.
You can't just trademark 3 letters in a way so that nobody else can use them. In fact there's hundreds of trademarks that are the letters "kik" in various logos[1].
What they trademarked is a bunch of specific logos containing those letters. Doesn't prevent other people from also using those 3 letters in some other way.
In fact when he wrote "kik", my first thought was the he was talking about the German textile discount store - which is the first result for me when I google those letters.
It's easy to be an armchair HN lawyer when you have no skin in the game.
As an attorney, do you think he was misusing the "Kik" trademark?
I don't know all the facts here, but I do know that as a practical matter, it comes down to a whole bunch of factors, among them, use in commerce, possibility of confusion, etc. But I can say that judges take a dim view of people who tell others to "fuck off" and who appear not to have a justifiable reason for using a name nor a long history of doing so.
I also know that bullies don't always win - Nissan Computer still owns nissan.com, not the motor company.
I'm shocked to see that something like this could happen on npm - where a single threat of getting lawyers involved can get your package transferred away from you. It really wants to make me not publish anything on npm too actually.
They removed that permission to limit it to only Pushbullet, and then were able to get back on.
I'm not saying there couldn't have been more hand-holding - but it wasn't exactly like it wasn't for a fairly egregious security breach.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in any Chrome/Android/Store team, or anything even vaguely related to that - this is purely my own opinion).
If the PB team hadn't gotten it to be as visible as it was, they very likely would have gotten away with it.
Regardless of that, just tell people what they've done wrong, developers are surely jaded by being told absolutely nothing about what or why some faceless mega corp is trampling all over their day.
Is it any wonder people like OP lash out in frustration and just pull all of their work when one has no means to obtain a straight answer? The man has a young child, and that is work enough, but it also puts things into perspective, and honestly, as a father of a months old child, I'd probably respond to this in the same way and think "fuck it, one less frustration" and just pull it too.
The PB post describes them removing permissions they realized they didn't need, you can check their writeup. Google's handling of this was poor but PB had real problems.
In this extension's case, we haven't even seen what notices Google sent.
That said, calling Google heavy handed is an understatement, and there have been several cases which have made it clear that kicking up a fuss online and being big enough to get some attention is the only means for recourse.
But Google just said "you're asking too much permissions". After the first fixes the extension got rejected again, without explanation.
And the other (I think more important) point was that we know even less about whatever happened to Kozmos.
Rejecting a fixed version is not lack of "hand-holding", and far-reaching permissions are not by default a "major security breach" (unless Google has a policy of shipping products with major security breaches built in?)
We all know that Google's support sucks, even they know it very well, just they don't give a shit. Everyone's pissed about this for years - anyone who ever tried to debug adsense, gmail or youtube account getting blocked out of the blue, or android app being flagged for no reason has gone through pretty much the same process this guy describes. Internet is full of horror stories of this kind, it's very well documented.
The only difference here is that most of us goes "c'est la vie" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and we continue using their services because - well - everyone else does it, what else could we do... while this guy doesn't mind giving them the finger... which will, and of course he knows that, hurt him much more than Google - but that's a move to be respected imho...
OK, so the is more to it than that and he did have a genuine grievance (I forgot exactly what) bit in dealing with that he caused a pile collateral damage for innocent bystanders.
(Innocent bystanders who errantly put too much faith in dependency oriented programming which brings us back to the broken system)
That said, the system is definitely broken.
His reaction to the Kik thing is probably where he was at fault, I think it would have been reasonable for him to back down there; companies, in the US at least are obligated to protect their IP in order to retain their rights over it (as far as I have understood from various discussions on HN), but perhaps the forceful lawyering got his back up?
Also I have no idea of jurisdiction of any parties involved, I just assume US.
and who need an external package to leftpad a string... the most fascinating part of that story to me...
Which is why it's a distraction to even consider this particular person's track record.
Even if this same person pulled one critical package a month for the next year, the fundamental problem is still that the ecosystem in general relies on parties with no obligations to manage critical dependencies.
Npm not only didn't realize that this guy was more important to their community and NodeJS on the whole than a one off from Kik, but they sold out to GitHub / M$FT.
All that for something that hasn't been updated in 2 years https://www.npmjs.com/package/@kikinteractive/kik
"Oh I didn't know there was a company with that name" well, now you know. How would you like to go into NPM and find someone has created a package with your or your company's name?
At the same time Kik's answer of "we're nice people but we're sending the lawyers" does not come across as friendly.
And yes, NPMs response is not surprising. They're going to side with the trademark owner, unless there was a very good reason not to (like the MikeRowSoft case)
Note to npm (or some future package repo site): create package namespaces. Allow renaming and maybe aliases.
I have a friend who encountered a similar scenario with a company claiming trademark on a name. In their case they simply changed the package name. It was frustrating but it meant everybody was able to move on without any drama. Subsequently, as far as I'm aware, the trademark holder has never even published a package under the original name. So I suppose that makes it doubly irritating, but such is life.
I think your suggestion would have neatly avoided a lot of these kinds of issues in the first place.
Granted, all I know of the author is based on what I've seen of his past behaviour. That does make me a little sceptical that his account of events represents the sum totality of truth around the situation. I don't believe that's an unreasonable perspective.
It does not mean the account is false, or that I lack sympathy for him[1], or that I'm unwilling to see or understand his point of view. What I was concerned by is that in the comments I was seeing nothing but unalloyed support, which I did not think was warranted based on what we know. I think I've been pretty clear about that.
I also think it's a shame that he's chosen to yank the extension, but that's obviously his choice and I can understand why he made it.
[1] Different context entirely but I've had my own issues with Google's algorithms, along with the sense of being left in the dark about why. I made some, actually useful, changes but I've still no idea if those are the reason the issues were resolved. Regardless, I'm glad that they have been resolved.
Your own comments come out as one-sided as anyone can be...
Yes, it really is the same guy: https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules. And, joking aside it would be wise to bear in mind that we're reading only one side of the story here. As with leftpad, there's another side to this.
With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you" (https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin...), and then wrought global havoc on npm users. Now he's claiming the Chrome Extension Team "continuously troll developers", and is pulling down something he's created... again.
I only have two data points, so the behaviour here is a coincidence rather than a pattern, but I will guarantee you whatever you think of Google there is more to this than meets the eye.
I'm not without sympathy for the author, but neither am I about to uncritically take his side.