Not sure why kik thought this post would make them look better. While "Bob's" choice of words is soft and creepy-friendly, his request wasn't. The npm escalation after Azer gave what they wanted, a price for "the hassle" of changing the project name, really shows what they really wanted is the name for cheap. They might say "unreasonable", but it really means "unreasonable to us".
It also shows they don't know how to negotiate at all, but that's tangential. You don't escalate to threat and then let the other side anchor the price.
And while if I was Azer I would have renamed the project (because someone else has a trademark on it), if I was kik I wouldn't pretend that bringing lawyers and being unable to negotiate is "a polite request", because imaginarily "I don't mean to be a dick"
If you don't want to be a dick, don't break into e-mail conversations with strangers, where you kik things off by invoking the vernacular names of genitalia.
Don't know where you see that fantasy? In the chain that kik published (probably the one that they thought made them look the best - mind you), I saw a load of passive aggressive/weasel words. Where's the offer?
If I call you up and bug you to do something for me (a stranger mind you); then it is up to me to come right out and explain the value proposition. Not hem and haw, dancing here and there - hoping that you will just drop to your knees, just because. And then when you don't - I can then get mad and threaten you? What world do you want to live in? That one sounds insane to me.
He called them a dick after they ended any possibility of negotiation with legal threats. They started it by seemingly making a request, he declined (curtly but not rudely) and they threatened legal action.
> "hahah, you’re actually being a dick. so, fuck you. don’t e-mail me back."
This is the developer the community gathered behind? Not only is that incredibly unprofessional (to say the least), kik is a registered trademark.
And - I've said this before, but I will repeat it here - unpublishing all your modules from npm ("liberating") is such a selfish and childish move, especially when so many people depend on your modules. That's the behavior of a preschooler. That's not "power to the people," as Azer put it in his original post. That's just an attempt to show that Azer has the power to bring chaos to the ecosystem.
People are so quick to jump to the defense of someone who is having their "freedom" suppressed, without knowledge of the situation.
Where does it end? An individual working on an open-sourced project has to get strong-armed out of a 3-letter name because a corporation paid for it? Isn't that concept a little ludicrous in its own right?
Could this eventually end up a constant corporate whack-a-mole until project names ultimately degrade to random strings of consonants?
If it's professional to contact someone and say "Hey buddy, we're bigger than you — change or we'll ruin you" then maybe "fuck you" is necessary.
That's a very slippery slope. Kik is an app and company that has been going on for years. It existed long before Azer's "kik" and, even if Azer does not know what it is, most people know "Kik" as the phone app and not the bootstrapping tool.
To extrapolate this incident to "companies will start snatching up three letter names, and nothing will ever be able to use a three letter name" is ridiculous.
Kik is a messaging app, kik is a node module. Was someone going to call up the app store and install a node module? Was someone potentially going to install a messaging app into their node project?
I associate Kik with a textile discounter. Just because they are known by parts of the population and have copyrights in some countries, do they really have the right to claim their name pretty much everywhere?
It's not copyright, but trademark (it's a subtle, but important distinction). And for trademarks, the short answer is it depends. Some trademarks have no protection (generics or ones that become generic) and others have infinite protection (famous marks, like Apple and Disney). While most have protection in their field (think the word Mac, it's a computer, a burger and a cusmotic brand).
Field however is hard to define, for example Trademark offices have categories and theoretically, you cannot have 2 trademarks owned by 2 different entities. That said, it does happen, because the "fields" are actually defined by likelihood of confusion, which is shown in court. If this is all confusing, it is.
But long story short, if your mark is famous (and kik's would be considered famous), you're the only one allowed to use it, and you HAVE TO in force it, otherwise, you lose it.
I'm happy to make an issue of professionalism in a professional environment. I spend my day in suits around businesses that will openly tell you they won't work with you because your tie looked cheap. There are businesses involved here, and people in business roles making, imo, unprofessional threats.
When you work all day, and then come home to provide unpaid support for a project, things are different. You're sitting in front on a television in shorts, in the least professional environment imaginable, and you're helping people who have issues with your code, because that's what it means to give to the community.
Then someone comes out swinging with a list of demands, regarding what you do in your own time. What is the return threat? "He wasn't professional so I'll stop making unpaid use of his products"?
I think threatening someone with lawyers is exactly what it sounds like: a threat. This is not polite behavior even if the text was written in a polite manner.
suppose you were in Azer's situation, where a corporation has threatened legal action against you, and then did an end-run around you and used their influence to have the maintainers of your software distribution platform act against you unilaterally.
would you feel like you had been treated justly? what would your response be?
Would I feel like I had been treated justly? Of course not. I would be angry. But in a situation like that, I can't blame npm because their hand was forced and I can't blame Kik for defending their trademark. Especially if they're planning on making a "kik" package that has something to do with, you know, their kik.
I'd like to think I'd be professional enough to change the name of the package once I was prompted by kik, reupload, and be done with it. I'd be miffed, but it's a piece of software. It won't ruin me to rebrand it. It'll take an afternoon, at most.
Cursing at people and calling people names, I'd like to think that we're above that as human beings, no matter how upset we are. That's something that teenagers in League of Legends do. That's not what a professional software engineer does.
They were not "forced" by court order or any other legal means, but they were "forced" because I can imagine going to court over the entire ordeal would have been incredibly draining on their finances and manpower and ultimately pointless. I'm willing to bet that whatever fallout this results in for npm (even as big as this has become) is ten times better than whatever would have happened if they'd decided to fight Kik over it. They probably just wouldn't exist anymore as a company.
I don't think it would have affected NPM whatsoever. The "draining" court battle would have been between Azer and KIK. to me the most confusing and inappropriate behavior in this whole sorry situation was that of NPM.
its easy for me to see where both KIK and Azer had legitimate claims to the name and its also totally legitimate for two parties to NOT come to an agreement outside of court. We have courts to settle disputes. That is where this should have ended up.
NPM effectively denied Azer his potential legal remedy by unilaterally supporting KIK.
But Kik Interactive wouldn't have taken them to court over this. It's a 100-person company. No one has the time, or the motivation to go on a tangent like that. Especially since they'll be paying hundreds or low-thousands in lawyer fees just to file.
I'm not a lawyer but I imagine it would be taken care of as a court order in the lawsuit between Kik and Azer. Suing npm or github for a trademark dispute they have with Azer would be silly. The most I could see levied directly against npm is a cease-and-desist. But I guess just mentioning lawyers is enough for npm to hand over a module namespace.
Hold on, hold on. Let's say you have worked hard on a project that you were not paid for, totally out of love for software.
And out of nowhere, a corporation threatens you to re-brand it else you are gonna face consequences, you are saying you will rename the package and be done with it ? Just like that ? Without asking why .. or finding a compromise ? I am sorry to say, but that's not how most people think.
Maybe this would have played differently if Bob would have used better language. But the fact that he went off with "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts" would have pissed off any person.
And why can't a software engineer be "unprofessional" in his own private time when he is dealing with "unprofessional" people in the first place ? Have you even read any of Linus' mails ?
"kik" is not actually a Trademark of KIK Interactive.
They do have "KIK" trademarked[0], but it is only claimed for:
>Computer software for use with mobile phones and portable computing devices to exchange, share and create text with other users; computer software for electronic messaging services; computer software for use with mobile phones and portable computing devices to exchange and share digital photos; computer software for use with mobile phones and portable computing devices to download audio, video, digital photos and programs; electronic payment systems, namely, a computer application software used for processing electronic payments to and from others; computer software for use with mobile phones and portable computing devices to create video and digital photos to share with other users; computer software for use with mobile phones to launch other applications and connect to other software services.
>Electronic payment services
>Electronic messaging services; wireless digital messaging services; telecommunications services, namely, electronic transmission of text messages; telecommunications services, namely, electronic transmission of digital photos; telecommunications services, namely, electronic transmission of audio, video, digital photos and computer programs; computer services, namely, providing interactive technology that allows users to create video and share audio and video with other users; telecommunications services, namely, providing computer software services for use with mobile phones and portable computing devices to create video and digital photos to share with other users.
As far as I can tell, kik [1] does not provide goods or services even remotely related to the KIK trademark.
And it's entirely possible (maybe even likely) that npm would have won in a court of law. But the legal expenses were probably simply not an option, and I don't blame them for that.
Because that's just not how the legal system works, at least not in the United States (Kik Interactive is located in Canada, npm Inc. is located in the US, so it's possible for Kik to file a lawsuit against npm in the US.)
Full disclosure, I'm not on Kik's side here. I think they should have let Azer keep the kik npm module. I'm just trying to explain why npm could be legally threatened.
Kik sent npm a request to take down a package with their trademarked name. If npm declined, they could have filed suit against npm. They would not have to prove that their trademark was valid before doing so. Even if they didn't have a trademark, they could file the case, knowing they would lose. It would be a very short case. Npm's lawyers would have to submit evidence that Kik didn't own the trademark, and the case would be dismissed.
But the important part here is that they would need to show up to court with lawyers, and this is not free. This is why (again, at least in the US) legal threats from big companies like Kik to small developers (or other individuals, or even smaller companies) like Azer are so threatening and offensive. Even if the company is in the wrong, and the small developer is in the right, the cost of hiring a lawyer and going to court is so expensive that you're better off just letting them have their way, even if they're wrong.
The point is that even showing up costs time and possibly travel expenses. Court proceedings are slow, so without a lawyer, you'll spend days of your time in court fighting the case.
It's possible to defend yourself without a lawyer. People have done it successfully. However, to be successful, you have to spend a lot of time learning, understanding and using the law to your advantage, and it's usually not worth it. Even lawyers will hire other lawyers to defend them, if they're defendants in a case outside their area of speciality.
There's a pervasive attitude that representing yourself without a lawyer lowers your chance of winning, though there are no hard statistics either way.
If you don't show up at all, you'll almost always lose. In many cases, if you fail to show up, the judge is required to rule in favor of the only party that showed up. Even if that wasn't the case, if the judge is only listening to one side of an argument, they're likely to agree with that side.
NPM doesn't need to send a lawyer or any representative.
KIK must prove infringement to get a court order and they won't be able to because they claim no Trademark protection in any goods or services that `kik` deals in.
NPM could have been a dispassionate observer, but decided to take it upon themselves to arbitrate a Trademark dispute. To me, this opens them up to liability if they make any incorrect decision or findings. Why would they want to take on this liability?
There is no pressing need for them to become involved. They should have let Trademark courts handle Trademark disputes.
> Kik sent npm a request to take down a package with their trademarked name.
I think they just asked for help in resolving the issue they made up. and used word "lawyers" few times. That's apparently is all what it takes US company to fold.
I won't defend either Azer or Kik. This whole episode just has me shaking my head. Why do people need to include a module for 10 lines of code that do something basic? Azer's actions brought chaos to the ecosystem because people started depending on the ecosystem to think for them. It wasn't something huge like Express or Mongoose that broke the internet, it was a stupid string padding function.
Am I the only one that doesn't have a problem with Azer here? So what if he wasn't super professional. He's got a guy invoking "lawyers will come and mess with you if you don't do this for us." That same guy then goes to npm afterwards and says "please, Azer wont do what we want."
I agree with you. Azer's response was pretty normal and understandable considering the circumstances. I too would be extremely annoyed if a corporate lawyer threatened me.
Under close reading, I can't help but wonder if this was all just a big misunderstanding. What sticks out to me is this line from the third email:
... if you actually release an open source project called kik, our trademark lawyers ...
But that makes no sense! The "open source project" Azer is talking about is already out in the open[1]. "Actually release" is an extremely weird way to talk about that, right?
That makes me wonder if when Bob saw "Sorry, I’m building an open source project with that name", he read, "There is a larger project called 'kik' I'm working on, maybe including a web site, marketing materials, other developers, SEO..." That would raise a flag, right?
So he tries to point out, quite reasonably, that they'd really have no choice but to try to protect their trademark in that case. They'd have to go after the domain name, the Twitter handle, anything else that was confusing consumers about what "kik" refers to. Wouldn't it be easier for everyone to change the name before all that stuff is launched?
But of course Azer doesn't have plans for any of that, and he didn't pick up on the hint, so what he hears is "Contrary to our claim to be friendly, we're planning to get our lawyers involved to shut down your npm module." And his response is, understandably though maybe not rationally, "Fuck you."
What makes me wonder is that nobody mentions the fact that they'd have a really hard time to fight for the 3-letter word "kik". A quick search in the USPTO's Tess database or WIPO's ROMARIN shows that there are way too many registrations under this name to make protection of a word mark likely (disclaimer: I'm very far from being a trademark expert, just interested in all the shenanigans some companies try to play under the name of patent/copyright/trademark laws).
> 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?
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.
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.
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 ?
> 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'd have a really hard time saying with a straight face that the Bob Stratton (Mar 11, 11:26) message was in keeping with it being nothing more than a polite request.
I guess I think the expectations of the dev aren't very realistic either, but I don't see what the goal of this post is, the messages pasted onto it don't paint the picture that the first part of the post tries to say exists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Funny how there are two sides of a story. Azer's representation of his message 'hahah, you’re actually being a dick. so, fuck you. don’t e-mail me back.' as 'My answer was “no”' is disingenuous.
Yeah, I don't know. Azer was very rude, and yes, the Kik guy was very polite. However, if you strip away the tone of the messages, it pretty much boils down to this:
"We want this name. Will you sell it to us?"
"No"
"We are going to take this name by force if we have to. Will you sell it to us?"
"No"
"What would it take for you to sell it to us?"
"30,000"
"NPM, give us this name or we bring in lawyers and use legal force."
I'm no lawyer, but if Kik's assertion of 'because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them' is true then I understand their actions - that's just the world we live in.
It was decent of the Kik guys to try and amicably sort it out before calling in the lawyers given the situation, though admittedly it's also cheaper for them this way. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect confusion between Kik's product and Azer's node module - the names are identical. NPM's stance is kind of covered by their policy[0], point 3.
I'm no lawyer, but if Kik's assertion of 'because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them' is true then I understand their actions - that's just the world we live in.
How is not attempting to negotiate the price a decent move? If you want to negotiate and someone asks for a price that you believe is unreasonable isn't it normal to counter that offer?
I don't see how saying "our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that " and using word "dick" in second message can be considered very polite.
In my experience lawyers are very conservative about this. I can believe that's the advice they're getting, but it's obviously not the full story. According to the eff[0] (article starts with some discussion irrelevant to this case).
"The circumstances under which a company could actually lose a trademark—such as abandonment and genericide—are quite limited. Genericide occurs when a trademark becomes the standard term for a type of good (‘zipper’ and ‘escalator’ being two famous examples). This is very rare and would not be a problem for Canonical unless people start saying “Ubuntu” simply to mean “operating system.” Courts also set a very high bar to show abandonment (usually years of total non-use). Importantly, failure to enforce a mark against every potential infringer does not show abandonment.
Yeah, I get it, there is a much larger context here wrt. trademark laws, etc. Still from azer's point of view he is absolutely correct. He's being screwed over by business interests and receiving no protection from npm. Surely there are other solutions that resolve the legal requirement for kik to defend their trademark without requiring that particular repository name to be surrendered.
So yeah, it's a bigger problem than just npm. All the more reason for azer to decide to leave npm. Obviously there is nothing in place to prevent this kind of abuse in the future so why continue to participate?
why would they do that? their concern was that a user might be confused over the names. they were interested in exclusive rights to the name, not in getting paid a token amount so someone else could use it.
You have your lossy compression turned up way too high.
"We want this name. Will you sell it to us?"
"No. I'll actually release something else with that name" [implied by 'I'm actually building a project etc]
"If you do release a project by that name, then our lawyers will have no choice but to enforce the trademark"
The rest of the exchange I can sort of agree with, but when you are actually negotiating, you don't usually call people names. That usually is grounds for terminating the negotiation, which happened.
> "No. I'll actually release something else with that name" [implied by 'I'm actually building a project etc]
It think you got it wrong. He's just saying that his using that name for the project he is currently building. It's already released. It's on npm. Maybe lawyer mistakenly inferred future tense like you did but there was none.
When they asked the question, Is there nothing we can do for you that would compensate you for the hassle of changing the name?, what was a reasonable response?
>> Yeah, you can buy it for $30.000 for the hassle of giving up with my pet project for bunch of corporate dicks
Obviously that wasn't the correct response. What should he have asked for, that Kik would have complied with?
Kik has over $100mil in funding and what, 100+ employees? the $30k response seemed intentionally pointed to highlight the kind of two-faced nature of the situation.
Kik will apparently throw around their perceived worth and size to threaten someone with legal action, but it's all "hey buddy do us a favor — don't be unreasonable" when it might cost them something?
probably leaving the "corporate dicks" part off would have been enough. Maybe the don't fork over the $30k but they'd probably have made an offer at least. Calling them "a bunch of corporate dicks" at the end makes it clear you're just throwing out what you think is a high enough number to tell them to fuck off.
That's a negotiating strategy. Not calling them dicks, but when someone pressures you to make the first offer and you don't know what ballpark you're in, toss out a really high number and see what happens. In this case the response was thinly-veiled legal threats.
> 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.
I think Azer should have just said no, waited for npm to force the rename/removal and then pulled all of the repo's. To me, this thread reeks of corporate damage control.
Also it should be stated that mproberts spent the last 6 years ladder climbing at Kik and I can understand that this likely feels like his baby.
But Kik's self-entitlement in this case is abhorrent. The package has existed for years and imposing themselves on the developer the way they did is sad, but not surprising given the current patent/trademark climate.
It's clear that npm has also done some cleaning, they've gone and tried to remove all evidence of the kik npm package being available in the first place. Even the single "kik" page on npmjs.com has been removed from the Wayback Machine. Talk about thorough.
Really? Which ones? I've only every worked with ones that allow you to register particular names, except for Vim and how it downloads packages from GitHub.
Wow, pretty rude response by Azer. I get being anti-corporate and all, but there are human beings involved here. A more polite response might have gone a long way.
kik could have named it something like 'kik-api' or use a private namespace ('@kik/api'), but it seems like Azer just goaded them into a legal course of action.
Yes, there are human beings involved here.
The sort that contact you out of the blue and tell you "I don't want to be a dick", and then threaten to have "our trademark lawyers [...] banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that ".
I think it's important to note that none of this was Kik's fault, really. Kik isn't the first company to send a trademark email to an open source project, and likely won't be the last. This merely shone a light on an area of NPM that was problematic.
The resulting behavior and side effects in NPM is unfortunate, but I'm pretty glad it happened so that it'll hopefully get addressed.
Yes. I'm glad that we have a moment when we can try to discuss and influence how this problem will be addressed.
But... (maybe I'm reading this wrong) what, exactly, is problematic with NPM?
@thedz, I'm not really picking on you, but the words you've used have made it clear to me that there is an assumption underlying this issue that's pretty common. The assumption that this conflict is a problem with NPM, i.e., with open-source.
Is that really true? And if it is, should it be?
Let's hypothesize that for the most part the "corporate world" and the "open source community" keep to themselves, have their own concerns, and don't conflict. -- When they do conflict, why does anyone assume that corporation should get its way, that their concerns are more legitimate?
It's as though we believe that, unless you get paid for something you do/make, it's not yours and you don't have any rights to it. We should think about that. And then we should look at the thing that Kik did to try and draw Azer into their world (onto their turf): they offered to pay him for it. They tried to to transmute something he was doing for free into something that belongs to the world of money.
I agree that it's not Kik's fault. They're just a company. Or rather, "it" is just a company. You can't expect it to act like a person. -- But this just hammers home the point that I'm trying to make, that these are really and truly different worlds colliding. Its not a big thing vs. a small thing. Its two different kinds of things. And we can't just default and use the terms and ways of the bigger thing to decide how to mediate the conflict. That's not right. That lazy. At best. Really it's just cowardly. A failure to think. A failure to believe that anything has meaning.
(Turns out there's a whole phenomenon studied in historiography (that's the academic discipline that studies how history is made) about how when two parties go to war, it is inevitably perceived through the lens of power and technology, -- specifically that the side with better technology is in the "right". Hm.)
In this context, it's uncanny that the discussion has centered around "who was polite" and "how much money". That's not really what this whole conflict is about. It's about whether we value a person's labor, and whether we're willing to devalue it if a company says "jump".
> But... (maybe I'm reading this wrong) what, exactly, is problematic with NPM?
I think the problem is that people should not (except in rare circumstances) be able to just remove packages. They should be immutable and have versions associated with them so that your builds are reproducible.
Sure I think that in some cases you should be able to have them removed like if there is a security vulnerability or something but I don't think some guy being upset should be sufficient.
That whole thing is crazy, but what sickens me the most in this article is this part:
> Isaac: 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. In this context, transferring ownership of these two package names achieves that goal.
How is that remotely a reason? Is a .com domain a trademark now?
I think it's entirely reasonable. Trademarks are not like copyrights or patents - they don't have to be novel ideas or anything, and they don't do very much. Trademarks exist to protect a brand, and that's it. For example, "Subway" is a perfectly normal, historical word, and it hurts no one for Subway Sandwiches to have a trademark on it; I can talk about it here with impunity, I can write novels about subways, I can even start a business called "Subway" as long as I don't sell sandwiches. Seems okay to me.
More broadly, if you don't allow English words or spelling plays on English words, what's left to allow? Chinese? Line noise?
You can say Kik was a dick, but they were actually super nice about it. They own the name kik in world trademark offices (this is a long and expensive process), they, under law, would be considered a famous mark and get the highest trademark protections, and they wanted to release a package called kik. If they didn't get Azer to change it, they would lose their entire trademark (it seems silly, but true).
I actually have received a nasty Trademark C&D in the past from NY attorneys (I live in Canada), and being told by our lawyers that it's actually on the "friendly" side of C&Ds they've seen. So what Kik did, and not get lawyers involved was actually the best way to handle it. Just look at the C&D and convo between Pair and Pair on TechCrunch.
Azer was actually the one being a dick, responding with "fuck you". You wouldn't expect someone to name an npm package called Disney or Apple or Microsoft or Intel.
Side note: if Kik were really being dicks, they could have sued Azer and forced him to appear in court, and Azer would likely lose. Also, kik also has a unique spelling and Kik owns Kik.com, it makes it harder for Azer to argue "look at square" (where square is too generic of a word). Trademarks are weird, and unless you're a trademark lawyer or been sued, they may come across as stupid, but they really aren't.
Kik (the company) are some shady ass m/f'ers. Yet the open source programmer is getting all of the lashes for telling them off? "He could of used a more grown up tone...???"
Also - NPM really dropped the ball. Shows how little they care about the developers that make them relevant in the first place.
Lastly - at the end of the day Azer's holding a big bag of jack....And has had his work effectively stolen (I'm referring to left-pad). How does this incentivize anyone to put their work in this resource going forward?
Azer is the hero of this story - make no mistake. He refused to make way for a big corporation, his only mistake was trusting that his choice of software host would have his back. Shame on npm and shame on kik.
kik actually looks worse after this post. So, they kept bringing up the L-word (lawyer), when they clearly know they don't have a case. Basically, they really are dicks.
Definitely could have been handled better on both sides. Kik should have just bluntly offered $N (where $N was however much it was worth to avoid bringing in lawyers) and bluntly offered it up front. Hinting around like "is there something we could do for you" seems disingenuous.
Ok, I know some people like the openness presented here by Kik and don't like Azer's response, but I just wanted to point this out from the perspective of a teacher who works with children from kindergarten to the 9th grade. If you get a short response like this as the first reply:
> Sorry, I’m building an open source project with that name.
This indicates that the person feels an emotional attachment to the name. Also, since the response is short and to the point, it is clear that they don't see any logical reason to give in. When responding to this, you need to use empathy (honestly, something severely lacking in a lot of these types of conflicts in the programming world). So rather than responding with this:
> We don’t mean to be a dick about it, but it’s a registered Trademark in most countries around the world and if you actually release an open source project called kik, our trademark lawyers are going to be banging on your door and taking down your accounts and stuff like that — and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them.
A good, proper response would have been something that:
1. Explains that Kik is their company's name and why not being able to use it would put them in a hard spot. Yes, it would be reiterating the point from the first email, but objectively, that first email wasn't exactly clear. No company links, no explanation of what this "important" package is, etc. NEVER expect someone that you are asking a favor from to go out of their way to figure out what you are saying. That's your responsibility.
2. Don't mention trademarks or lawyering up. That's a power play and all teachers know that you don't need to wield the authority stick most of the time. With something like this, it's worse because you are threatening a person's livelyhood. If that's your go to response, you will 100% get instantly shut out both emotionally and logically. Expect compromise to end right there.
3. When asking for a favor, cause this is a favor, and trying to compromise, don't ask them what they want. They obviously want the package name. For those of you who have been in salary negotiations before, this should ring a bell. This is a power play by Kik to give up as little as possible for what they want. Kik is the one asking a favor. Say the word favor. Make it known that Azer would be doing a good thing by compromising and helping you out. Make the first offer. Give Azer something to think about and go from there.
Having seen Kik's initial attempts at communication, I can now 100% understand Azer's response. It's the obvious result. Immature? Overblown? Honestly, this is pretty much par for the course with most humans no matter the age. Some of us are just better at stopping and taking a moment to think before replying. On the internet where you cannot see who you are talking to? There is even less of a barrier.
I can make a lot of parallels to teaching and working with children, but I think what I wrote should be clear enough. Kik is in the wrong here and really needs to apologize for their actions - to the community and to Azer - and should put in some effort to helping NPM fix this fiasco.
I find it quite masterful the way Bob introduces a certain level of language with his opening sentence: (quote) "We don’t mean to be a dick about it".
Azer totally takes the bait and the rest of the email exchange descends into reusing that word a lot, quite rude really.
So glad I managed to avoid to have to code in the mess that is the Javascript ecosystem so far.
Oops I got to start on an Angular project soon :-p
I'm still going through these emails, but I will give Kik credit for at least being polite about the whole thing - I criticized them in my post earlier about not representing the Canadian tech industry well through their legal action haha
It also shows they don't know how to negotiate at all, but that's tangential. You don't escalate to threat and then let the other side anchor the price.
And while if I was Azer I would have renamed the project (because someone else has a trademark on it), if I was kik I wouldn't pretend that bringing lawyers and being unable to negotiate is "a polite request", because imaginarily "I don't mean to be a dick"