You start a project with the same name as a company, which owns the registered brand and are surprised when some 3rd party complies with legal suggestions to make an adjustment?
Seems kind of silly to expect that NPM would want to fight for your project name when you didn't seem to do your own due diligence when picking a name. Also, a bit backwards to go remove all your modules as well, therefore breaking builds.
A trademark gives you protection of a mark within a specific industry. "Software" is not a specific industry. They do not get wholesale ownership of the term.
And if you blindly install a module, expecting it to be some official release without looking it up, you're an idiot.
NICE Class 9 is far more extensive than that:
"Scientific, nautical, surveying, photographic, cinematographic, optical, weighing, measuring, signalling, checking (supervision), life-saving and teaching apparatus and instruments; apparatus and instruments for conducting, switching, transforming, accumulating, regulating or controlling electricity; apparatus for recording, transmission or reproduction of sound or images; magnetic data carriers, recording discs; compact discs, DVDs and other digital recording media; mechanisms for coin-operated apparatus; cash registers, calculating machines, data processing equipment, computers; computer software; fire-extinguishing apparatus."
Computers programs are a part of 090373 which has a breakdown of ~100 subcategories.
There are 45 Nice classes. Being in the same top-level class is not confusingly similar. Unless you think Kik Marine Compasses and Kik Instant Messenger might be confusingly similar.
b) NPM shouldn't have to fight it unless they are requested to, the trademark claim was ridiculous to begin with. Regardless of the claim, enforcing it would have taken years... I'm not saying NPM shouldn't have comply with the request and rename the package but definitely could/should have handled this better.
c) the guy wrote: "NPM is no longer a place that I’ll share my open source work at, so, I’ve just unpublished all my modules." I think it's pretty clear why we pull all of his modules.
> the trademark claim was ridiculous to begin with.
EDIT: cool HN, -2 for stating a fact. Sure, I don't disagree that this lawsuit is kind of silly, but npm's laywers don't think this suit is _frivolous_, which is what matters.
Pursuing a NPM package names?????? for real?!
If you've ever worked with lawyers you would have known that they would always be on the conservative (safe) side without understand the business implications.
It's only a matter of time until NPM is socially engineered into replacing a module with something more malicious, if it hasn't already happened.
1) As "just a fact" it's irrelevant. With some interpretation added, it contributed something. However...
2) As participants in a market economy, the lawyers' primary interest may not be the letter of the law or what is theoretically winnable in court, but what will give npm the least hassle. I'm not sure if that's the case in this particular trademark case, but we all know lawyers sometimes do counsel the path of least resistance. And maybe that's even wise. But it's worth being clear about that ambiguity, rather than just saying "lawyers said it, I believe it."
P.S. I think your comment isn't super helpful but I didn't downvote you.
That is why the law should be formalized such that correctness proofs for argumentations can be given and in doubt even be checked independently by a computer. Exactly because of the possibility of different opinions and wishes, coming up with such a high standard should be considered a maxim.
That is rather an argument why in doubt one should not put such harsh punishments into the law - a thesis which I support.
Perhaps you could start with this: to formalize any set of laws and criminal procedure similar to the actually existing law, you'll have to define knowledge, and that is a quagmire (http://www.unc.edu/~ujanel/Gettier.htm--you don't have to read the entire paper, but at least read the first section for a feel of how nasty the project gets. If you need more background, here is the description of what the Gettier problem is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem).
I know that the Moon is about 400,000 km away from the Earth. I have never measured the distance and I haven't even tried to check if it's plausible: I read it somewhere and accepted it as such.
As far as I know this is a mostly done problem (google "statistics").
Which means if they say "it's very serious threat" and the code gets deleted everybody would think they are serious lawyers even if the claim looked ridiculous - because you see, lawyers said it's serious and who are you to argue?
On the other hand, if they ever say "it's ridiculous" and then they get sued, they could be fired or at least suffer damage to their reputation for not preventing it.
Thus, there is exactly zero incentive for the lawyers - at least ones acting purely according to near-term incentives - to ever take even a minimal risk and declare anything like that ridiculous. They have all incentives to always react as if it was 100% genuine infringement - because that costs very little and has no risk.
Some lawyers and companies are more civic-minded and reject some ridiculous requests and take risk because that's the right thing to do. But you can not require people to be heroes.
On the other hand, we are not lawyers, so we have all the incentives to proclaim how ridiculous the whole thing is.
>Computer software for use with mobile devices, namely, computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones for downloading, displaying, transmitting, receiving, editing, extracting, encoding, decoding, playing, storing and organizing text, sound, images, audio files and video files
Organising text is what Kik (the project) does, so it would infringe the trademark?
(I suspect, though, that NPM might have some legal liability, and Kik [the company] could sue them regardless, which would suck for them.)