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Comment by uuoc | Hacker News Reader

The second Bob Stratton response (the one implying that lawyers will rain fire and brimstone down on Azer if he does not comply) was so far from a "polite request" that it implies something is wrong with Mike Roberts understanding of "polite" for him to say what he did.

What Mike Roberts should have done, upon seeing Bob Stratton's second email, is walked over to Bob's office/cube/desk/where-ever and had a very long heart-to-heart talk with Bob about his incredibly poor handling of the situation.

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The language is amiable enough, it just isn't in any way a request, it's a statement that they believe their trademark is being infringed and that they will enforce it.

It is a overt threat of lawyers attacking if he does not comply.

Nothing "amiable" about it. It is a threat, pure and simple.

It's not unreasonable by any means.

Am I the one that's misunderstanding what polite means? It sounds like several people, including Kik, seem to think it's just how you word things. As long as you threaten someone with lawyers using polite language it's polite? I don't know about you guys, but if someone did that to me "polite" would be the furthest thing from my impression of the exchange.

"If you don't give me the thing I want then I won't be able to prevent myself from hitting you in the face." ... polite?

I think perhaps he didn't mean to sound like a serious threat and when he realized what he'd done he pretended as if he didn't understand why Azer was upset. I do think Azer looks kind of childish here but that lawyer bit was way overdone.

For me lawyer seems way more childish in this exchange. Azer just seems to by firmly standing his ground to ridiculous claim.

It's not true that if they don't get kik package on npm they'll loose their trademark. It's not true that they can't prevent their lawyers from going after him, there are multiple ways to avoiding that. 30k$ is not high price for doing something you never had any intention of doing.

The 'fire and brimstone' commment was responding the comment about an 'open-source project' bearing the same name.

Which is not unreasonable. That moved the discussion from a single module to an entire project.

Furthermore, since companies are actually required to enforce trademarks, the comment is nothing more of a reminder of what would necessarily have to happen. It's not like they could just ask the lawyers not to enforce the trademark.

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