Holy s**t man, stop with this trademark nonsense. It's clear you understand little to nothing about trademark law and it's intricacies. Please argue from a perspective that you understand. Reading your comments is painful. One moment "I am not a lawyer" but then you continue to argue as if you are.
I don' think that's the real issue here. The problem is that the whole javascript eco system is built and used in such a way that someone can break the internet by removing a 12 line package from a website. The reasons why he did that are irrelevant.
This has nothing to do with Copyright, which isn't applicable at all. And it's not "illegal" to not remove something with a name conflict on the Internet. Trademark law is a civil matter, and there are a lot of complexities to what extent a company is protected. I think NPM should have waited for a letter from a lawyer and given the author a chance to legally respond. The whole "don't want to get lawyers involved ha ha! so please take away someone else's work" shouldn't really fly. It probably would have ended with the same result, but at least there would be a proper process around it.
This has nothing to do with copyright law. In your case your code is copyrighted so someone who is not the owner put it on pypy. But in kik case there was no copyright law broken. The issue was a trademark and he didn't lose a lawsuit but npm sided with the company which was wrong. It was wrong because you allowed to use the same name for non-related thing. For example in Germany if you say kik to anyone, no one would think about chat program from kik.com but they would think about kik.de (so 2 different companies use exactly the same name).
As far as I understand, Fernando, he used the name Kik without knowing there was a company in US that registered the name. Actually, there are a lot of companies called Kik in the world !! That kind of short names are pursued by companies, and they registered it. This patenting existing names is quite a issue, worldwide. Azer is Turkish, that Kik is US (there are a Austrian, a German one, etc), Internet is international. Consider that a lot of names of packages are probably the name of some company on the world. And if a much bigger company with more lawyers wants the name Kik for another package, NPM will reassign them the name? We can be changing names of packets just because a company decided to adopt a name, it would be a never-ending mess. So, for me, declining such kind of request was the logical step to take, and fulfilling it was a failure from NPM. Maybe they had no option due to the laws of the country they are in, which shows that this is a problem to be solved: in laws and/or software structure.
And I understand perfectly the feelings of the developer: so many people working for OpenSource make the base of what is programming today, and if a company comes with a request, the choice of the developer is disregarded, undone, and even twice.
But well, yes, the point of this article is how code is build and related.
Thats a false implication. He did understand copyright, the kik lawyers tried to conflate patents, trademarks, and copyrights. His kik package predated the kik company and therefore his claim to the copyright for his filename was legitimate. Npm further broke the law itself by republishing his package without consent as it had been previously litigated that "open-source" does not mean free or free use. The material still belongs to the owner and can only be used or published as licensed. In this case as part of another module and not as a package itself.
It's a shame this nonsense is the first comment on here. We get that you were in the same situation as kik and you won you so you think you were right. You weren't, and neither was kik. You don't magically get to use your name everywhere because you are a company. Might does not make right.
And yet you are insisting that the company that has trademarked kik in one country can ignore all trademark/copyright laws in the rest of the world, just because they are in another country ...
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I wonder if Indonesia government will sue us for using name Java or Java Script , since Java is the name of their island... #eh..
Holy s**t man, stop with this trademark nonsense. It's clear you understand little to nothing about trademark law and it's intricacies. Please argue from a perspective that you understand. Reading your comments is painful. One moment "I am not a lawyer" but then you continue to argue as if you are.
I don' think that's the real issue here. The problem is that the whole javascript eco system is built and used in such a way that someone can break the internet by removing a 12 line package from a website. The reasons why he did that are irrelevant.
Exactly. I'll add my perspectieve as a root comment.
This has nothing to do with Copyright, which isn't applicable at all. And it's not "illegal" to not remove something with a name conflict on the Internet. Trademark law is a civil matter, and there are a lot of complexities to what extent a company is protected. I think NPM should have waited for a letter from a lawyer and given the author a chance to legally respond. The whole "don't want to get lawyers involved ha ha! so please take away someone else's work" shouldn't really fly. It probably would have ended with the same result, but at least there would be a proper process around it.
This has nothing to do with copyright law. In your case your code is copyrighted so someone who is not the owner put it on pypy. But in kik case there was no copyright law broken. The issue was a trademark and he didn't lose a lawsuit but npm sided with the company which was wrong. It was wrong because you allowed to use the same name for non-related thing. For example in Germany if you say kik to anyone, no one would think about chat program from kik.com but they would think about kik.de (so 2 different companies use exactly the same name).
Software and human relationships and emotions are intrinsically tied in a forever loop.
Regardless of who may have been right or wrong in this case, it demonstrates the delicate nature of this complicated thing we've built.
As far as I understand, Fernando, he used the name Kik without knowing there was a company in US that registered the name. Actually, there are a lot of companies called Kik in the world !! That kind of short names are pursued by companies, and they registered it. This patenting existing names is quite a issue, worldwide. Azer is Turkish, that Kik is US (there are a Austrian, a German one, etc), Internet is international. Consider that a lot of names of packages are probably the name of some company on the world. And if a much bigger company with more lawyers wants the name Kik for another package, NPM will reassign them the name? We can be changing names of packets just because a company decided to adopt a name, it would be a never-ending mess. So, for me, declining such kind of request was the logical step to take, and fulfilling it was a failure from NPM. Maybe they had no option due to the laws of the country they are in, which shows that this is a problem to be solved: in laws and/or software structure.
And I understand perfectly the feelings of the developer: so many people working for OpenSource make the base of what is programming today, and if a company comes with a request, the choice of the developer is disregarded, undone, and even twice.
But well, yes, the point of this article is how code is build and related.
Thats a false implication. He did understand copyright, the kik lawyers tried to conflate patents, trademarks, and copyrights. His kik package predated the kik company and therefore his claim to the copyright for his filename was legitimate. Npm further broke the law itself by republishing his package without consent as it had been previously litigated that "open-source" does not mean free or free use. The material still belongs to the owner and can only be used or published as licensed. In this case as part of another module and not as a package itself.
It's a shame this nonsense is the first comment on here. We get that you were in the same situation as kik and you won you so you think you were right. You weren't, and neither was kik. You don't magically get to use your name everywhere because you are a company. Might does not make right.
And yet you are insisting that the company that has trademarked kik in one country can ignore all trademark/copyright laws in the rest of the world, just because they are in another country ...