Seems that we should now prefix any package name with a random string like 'skdjdihsawqy'. This way you could maybe avoid to be the target for some of those 'has to proof itself' lawyers.
This would solve classes of issues with the npm ecosystem (many of which remind me of trying to register a domain name) like name-squatting, trying to think up a marketable-but-untaken name, and ownership transfer.
OP claimed a bunch of sweet dictionary words (concat, iframe, door, bud, alert, map) and new owners are now claiming them and it's a security disaster. But it'd be a lot less interesting if they unpublished "azer/map", "azer/alert", "azer/iframe", etc. and new owners republished under their own names.
(Edit: this was written under the assumption that the lawyers in question are working on behalf of kik, the cheap clothes company, not kik, the messenger company. The original article is unclear about that)
This really has to be attacked at the root: let's all stop pretending that a sequence of characters can be owned. Before the web came along, people were completely sane about the protection of brands. Nobody had delusions about string ownership, but deceptive abuse of brand names was suppressed just as well. Enter the web, and suddenly corporations start thinking they somehow deserve exclusivity for their stupid little three-letter-acronym, at first on the DNS, now, apparently, also in search engine hit lists ("oh noes, someone might google themselves onto github instead of our site, people will start wearing NPMs instead of our clothes!").
