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.
"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."
Sure, kik could have taken a slower approach but that's an important detail.
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?
"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.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
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.
All the more reason for azer to opt-out. There is no reasonable recourse within the existing system.
To which I say:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4bnrn4/a_discu...
"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.
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.
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.