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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

> We're sorry for creating any impression that this was anything more than a polite request.

This is some truly epic weasel-wording, surely. It is literally impossible to read "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that" as not being "anything more than a polite request". That’s not how language works.

Maybe you mean to say that you regret explicitly threatening Azer with the full force of your lawyers?

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It isn't a threat though, the company has no choice but to enforce their trademark when they see it infringed. Otherwise they lose the right to that trademark. That's the mess trademark law is in, fail to enforce it once, and that will risk any future trademark action.

If they were honestly worried about trademark, they would have asked him to put a 'Not affiliated with Kik interactive, inc.' in his readme. His project is still on Github.

They weren't worried about trademarks, they wanted the NPM package name.

Which, perhaps, could have been arranged, were not for the childish responses?

No, Azer's wish was to be left alone to continue to use kik for the open source project he created.

He offered it to them for $30k according to that medium post. Thats something

As someone else pointed out elsewhere in the thread, that's not really the case:

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

Eh. The EFF sorta handwaves genericide there, but that's literally the exact reason why companies do this stuff, and it is a real concern.

> This is very rare and would not be a problem for Canonical unless people start saying “Ubuntu” simply to mean “operating system.”

Well, yeah, but that's what can happen when you don't police it. That's sorta the point of policing it, so that that exact scenario does not come to pass.

> It isn't a threat though, the company has no choice but to enforce their trademark when they see it infringed. Otherwise they lose the right to that trademark.

This is such a silly argument. I'd like to see it happen. Company loosing trademark because there exists npmjs.org package with the same name.

I do not know much about trademark laws, but can you explain how having a npm package on another company's name infringing their trademark ? Just what level of detail can a company have trademarks on ?

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