
Kik's side of yesterday's story - bhollan
https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breaking-of-the-internet-3d4d2a83aa4d#.rr0wqoy5f
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c3t0
Already submitted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11346845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11346845)

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gus_massa
It has been submitted many times. The one you choose is the one that has much
more discussion than the others:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11346845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11346845)
(147 points, 22 hours ago, 111 comments)

~~~
c3t0
First posted as far as I could tell.

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bcg1
Pro tip: if you find yourself starting a sentence with the words "I don't mean
to be a dick but...", it probably means you're about to say something that
qualifies as "being a dick".

Also, who uses that kind of language anyhow? Certainly not a professional
communicating in good faith. To be honest "Kik's sides of yesterday's story"
doesn't make them look good at all. NPM doesn't look very good either.

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chillingeffect
I think it's hypocritical of kik to say that threatening to bring in lawyers
is substantially different from actually bringing them in.

Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't change the fact that it's a pig. Being
superficially polite, by using polite-sounding words in a threat, is still a
threat.

~~~
ahstilde
I don't think it's a threat at all. If you have a trademark, you must defend
it. Otherwise you risk losing it. It's as simple as ABC.

~~~
sintaxi
Kik.com can only defend the term `kik` within the domain that they use the
mark. Which by their own words 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"

[https://trademarks.justia.com/858/93/kik-85893307.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/858/93/kik-85893307.html)

Based on this description of service the `kik` npm package does not infringe
on the Kik.com trademark in any way.

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askyourmother
Some will laugh because Kik started all this, and got affected by it. Some
will laugh when they look at npm, and the state of js "devs". Some will then
turn back to their current project, thank the stars it is coded in anything
but js, and move on.

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sintaxi
I really don't understand npm Inc. line of thinking here.

> In this case, we believe that most users who would come across a kik
> package, would reasonably expect it to be related to kik.com

By this logic a trademark will automatically be awarded to the largest company
regardless of all other factors but this is not how Trademark law works.

Is Azer's use of `kik` disingenuous or misleading in any way? I would say no.
His use of `kik` is in reference to "Kick starter" which has nothing to do
with Kik.com [who has a Trademark
registered]([https://trademarks.justia.com/858/93/kik-85893307.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/858/93/kik-85893307.html))
with the following description...

> 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

Azer's `kik` package is clearly not infringing on kik.com marketshare and his
use of the term "kik" appears to be valid as it relates to "Kick starter" and
has nothing to do with "downloading, displaying, transmitting, receiving,
editing, extracting, encoding, decoding, playing, storing and organizing text,
sound, images, audio files and video files".

npm Inc. should return this package name back to Azer. Kik.com is overreaching
here and I see no case law to suggest that Kik.com should get this name handed
to them just because they are the larger entity.

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codelectron
"I found out about this problem like a lot of you, when our builds started
failing because we use the extremely helpful JSCS. Through a long chain of
dependencies, JSCS relied on left-pad@0.0.3, which was removed by the author
yesterday. Our team was confused at the time as well."

Ironically we will be witnessing the same thing if an hypothetical company
'leftpad' threatened the developer to change the name.

------
bhollan
I'm still pretty eager to hear NPM's justification for it's actions.

