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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.

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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.

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

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

I think hearing from a reasonable person is better than just getting a Cease & Desist letter.

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