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I've Just Liberated My Modules

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Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#201

Post by dublinben »

tantalor wrote: post #185
nordsieck wrote: post #157

One interesting thing to me, is that it is pretty clear that the kik lawyers pretty dramatically over enforced their trademark. For those who don't know, the purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion; essentially we don't want people to be able to sell cheap knock-offs of someone else's thing without the general public being able to easily distinguish between them. In practical terms, trademarks are "sco…

They have the responsibility to defend their trademark, otherwise it could be abused by a rival claiming they did not adequately defend it. That said, NPM could have just said, "No, stop bothering us" and the lawyers might have backed down, satisfied their attempt to defend the trademark fulfilled their duty.

>They have the responsibility to defend their trademark

This is not limited to only issuing cease and desists. Kik Interactive can offer a zero cost license for the trademark if they want to assert their ownership, but let the project continue to use their name.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#202

Post by delinka »

nordsieck wrote: post #157

One interesting thing to me, is that it is pretty clear that the kik lawyers pretty dramatically over enforced their trademark. For those who don't know, the purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion; essentially we don't want people to be able to sell cheap knock-offs of someone else's thing without the general public being able to easily distinguish between them. In practical terms, trademarks are "sco…

"Providing an interactive website featuring online non-downloadable software" indicates to me that there could indeed be confusion in a repository of software code to be used by other applications.

I'd suggest it's certainly not obvious over-enforcement.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#203

Post by bsder »

tantalor wrote: post #185
nordsieck wrote: post #157

One interesting thing to me, is that it is pretty clear that the kik lawyers pretty dramatically over enforced their trademark. For those who don't know, the purpose of trademarks is to prevent customer confusion; essentially we don't want people to be able to sell cheap knock-offs of someone else's thing without the general public being able to easily distinguish between them. In practical terms, trademarks are "sco…

They have the responsibility to defend their trademark, otherwise it could be abused by a rival claiming they did not adequately defend it. That said, NPM could have just said, "No, stop bothering us" and the lawyers might have backed down, satisfied their attempt to defend the trademark fulfilled their duty.

> They have the responsibility to defend their trademark, otherwise it could be abused by a rival claiming they did not adequately defend it.

Agreed, but you can do this without pissing off everybody in the universe.

http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-daniels-wrote-what-has-t...

Before, I had no idea who kik was. Now, I know them as a bunch of jerks.

Big fail for a "social media" company.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#204

Post by profmonocle »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #139
profmonocle wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no legal claims to be made over NPM package names. Why not? An NPM package name is the name of a piece of software, and software names are very much covered under trademark law.

An NPM package name is just what NPM scraped from a package.json file.

The technical details of how package names enter their system aren't really relevant from a legal point of view.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#205

Post by hellbanner »

Can we talk about how patents own namespaces? If I have a little "kik" soccer tournament that no one knows about, then it's fine. As soon as the namespace collides with the HUGE, vastly connected internet, it's a "problem".

We're going to run out of proper nouns, folks.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#206

Post by andy9775 »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #188
andy9775 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't (shouldn't) npm block same named modules from being uploaded with a different username? Proposal: go with a java based naming system: com.yc.mymodule. All installations would require the user to use com.yc.* in package.json and all users would be required to register as a com.yc style organization name. Thus only one user can remove/add that exact module.

npm has namespaces, but they are optional and not hugely adopted as of yet.

Hmm but then is the scope/namespace reserved for each user that reserves/uses it? If I publish @andy9775/left-pad can someone publish under @andy9775/other-module or can only I publish under @andy9775/...?

If so, why is no one using this???

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#207

Post by profmonocle »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #133
zippergz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the legal basis for the claim that NPM package names are somehow exempt from trademark and other law?

NPM does not offer packages as commerce. The package removed was not used in commerce. The KIK trademark does not claim any functionality related to the removed module. What legal basis is there that NPM packages are subject to trademark, or other law? NPM takes its names from the package.json file. The law has no say over what one may put into their package.json file.

Offering a product/service for free doesn't exempt it from trademark law. I couldn't make an open source word processor and call it "Microsoft Word".

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#208

Post by tobltobs »

My congrats and respect for his decision. Through actions like this companies might understand that the current trademark (and patent) law is only benefiting lawyers.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if as a result of this the build for KIKs Pedo API are broken?

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#209

Post by ploxiln »

camwest wrote: post #96

FYI I'm the one who republished left-pad after it was unpublished. I think of it similar to letting a domain name expire. The original author removed the code and I forked it and published a new version with the same package name. The main issue was there were so many hard coded dependencies to 0.0.3 so I asked npm support if they could allow me to re-publish that version and they complied since I was now the maintai…

So if I understand correctly

  * npm allows a module to be deleted
    so all fetches of published name-oldversion fail
  * npm allows you to take-over the name of a deleted module
    and publish name-newversion
  * npm does not allow you to "re-publish" name-oldversion
    which had existed before the deletion
    but npm ops forced this publish for your special case
That's a strange combination of constraints. If you're going to reserve the name-oldversion permanently, you might as well leave the content there too. (Except, I guess, for license compliance...)

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#210

Post by DonPellegrino »

nas wrote: post #66
aidos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using npm / browserify etc in anger for the first time today. This is a horrible issue to have run into and it's left a pretty sour taste. The fact that it's possible for someone to unpublish 17 lines of js and break the install of major bits of infrastructure for everybody is pretty insane. It seems like at a minimum the dependency tree should be traversed to see what the flow on effect will be. Should it even b…

I don't want to sound like a old grumpy man but here goes anyhow. I was looking into using node.js, react, etc after many years of writing web apps using Python and Quixote (obscure web framework like Flask). The whole Javascript technology stack looks pretty insane of me. Getting a working React environment requires a huge number of packages to be pulled down by npm. Browserify requires a bunch more. Recursive depen…

The frontend part of my team is using Mithril for a serious project. They seem to be enjoying it. It was chosen for the reasons you listed.
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