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I've Just Liberated My Modules

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Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#791

Post by ergothus »

jhall1468 wrote: post #440
overgard wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple thing doesn't work though, for a specific reason: it's a very common word/name. Smith is a very common surname. If one person starts the Smith Automobile Company and another person starts the Smith Farm, obviously there's no issue there. That's because none of us invented "Smith", it's understood to be a common name, etc. On the other hand, if I start "The Google Paper Company", I'm pretty damn sure I would…

That is not how trademarks work. Feel free to start the Google Paper Co. Uniqueness is not a merit for trademark infringement. To infringe you have to be a competitor.

Check out the case law about Mcdonalds v Quality Inns (re: McSleep Inns)

Mcdonald's was able to show that there would be consumer confusion DESPITE Mcdonald's not doing hotels nor Mcsleep inns not doing food.

As a result, Mcdonalds basically has an open trademark enforcement on "Mc-" whatever.

While I'm not fond of the judgement here, it was nonetheless decided thusly, and contradicts your otherwise accurate (so far as I know) statement. (And to weaken my own point, I believe Apple lost a similar case about i, so nothing here is clear and reliable.)

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#792

Post by brazzledazzle »

vskarine wrote: post #788
brazzledazzle wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance someone at Kik the company wanted to create an npm module and decided the escalation to lawyers was the right way to resolve things? Seems like the lawyer was more interested in getting possession of the name on npm then actually fighting for a trademark. It doesn't even sound like they bothered with a formal cease and desist.

https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin...

Guess that answers that. Bob may have been going beyond what he should have or what they intended but in the end he represented Kik and they have to take responsibility for that.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#793

Post by dalke »

Havvy wrote: post #477
smsm42 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how long /usr/bin/true source is.

On Linux, it's 30ish lines, with half of those there to make false.c able to reuse some code. (I know, it's stupid.) In OpenBSD, it's 3 LoC IIRC.

On at least one OS I worked with, it was 0 bytes long because /bin/sh on an empty file returns true. (I think that was IRIX 4.x.) OTOH, that's slower than the executable from a 3 LoC do-nothing program.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#794

Post by _wmd »

mathetic wrote: post #116
_wmd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a 15 line function shouldn't grant someone the right to break an entire language ecosystem I think the real issue though here is technical - does npm really allow mutation of published assets like this? That's a shitty situation that can only lead to unreliable builds

First, you should never have a dependency for 15 lines. Second, you sound just like people when pointed at modern art says "I could have done that" and I believe the correct response is "you didn't."

Pray tell, what is the minimum size that should be required before permitting a dependency? Constant-time string compare is only 5 lines or so, should we cutpaste security critical functions too? "We ran your code on $new_arch and discovered a timing attack." "It's not my fault!@# The professionally maintained and reviewed implementation was too small to depend on!@#!"

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#795

Post by larkinrichards »

joshmanders wrote: post #657
larkinrichards wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underscore/lodash is a great bundle of functions that do simple things well. And it's a tiny enough library that there is really no need to split it into 270 modules. I support packages of utility functions. Distributing them individually is a waste of resources when you have tree shaking. I trust a dependency on lodash. I don't trust a dependency on a single 17 line function.

While I agree with you, tree shaking is relatively new in the JavaScript world thanks to Webpack 2 and Rollup.js before that, if you had a dependency you brought it's whole lib into your project whether you used one method or all of them. So just including Lodash wasn't an option for people who cared about loading times for their users. A 17 line module was.

Closure Compiler's advanced mode (tree shaking) has been around since 2010.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#796

Post by jsprogrammer »

steveklabnik wrote: post #720
chc wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, really? That's strange. I just checked both @npmjs and @izs and don't see any comment on the merits of the complaint now.

Further comment: turns out that npm lied about this. So I'm just straight-up wrong.

Thanks for the followup. Hopefully this moves on to better places.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#797

Post by jhall1468 »

tempestn wrote: post #785
jhall1468 wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct in that my Google example would likely be trademark infringement because Google is a famous mark. Kik is not a famous mark, so for this case the famous/well-known aspect of trademark infringement is entirely moot. And keep in mind that the OP I was responding to was arguing that if the name is unique it gets extra protection. That's false. Fame offers extra protection, uniqueness does not.

"According to Kik Interactive, as of December 2015, Kik Messenger had approximately 240 million registered users, and was used by approximately 40 percent of United States teenagers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kik_Messenger Are you sure a court wouldn't consider that qualifying as a famous mark? I'm not going to dig into case law, but my guess is it very well could be. "Evidence relevant to the fame of a trademar…

> Are you sure a court wouldn't consider that qualifying as a famous mark? I'm not going to dig into case law, but my guess is it very well could be.

Teenagers represent 9.5% of the US population meaning that 3.8% of the US population (using their 40% figure) have "used" their app. Alternatively the 240 million registered users would imply about 3.5% of the total global population has used it.

I can say that I honestly have ZERO doubt that "kik" would never be ruled famous by any possible measure.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#798

Post by smsm42 »

visarga wrote: post #428
smsm42 wrote: post #348

Reading some of the comments reminds me old tale about a young man, that every morning on his way to work passed by a beggar and gave him a coin (that was back when coins actually had some value). One morning though the beggar notices the coin is smaller than usual, and he asks: - Why you gave me a different coin today? and the young man says: - I got married and now I'm starting a family, I need more money so I can…

> But let's not lose the perspective - the author does not owe us or npm continued support On the other hand, he wanted his work published in the community registry where they got exposure and were made into dependencies in lots of projects. When the author offered their modules and then suddenly walked away with them, lots of innocent devs who built their projects with his modules got hurt. He did more bad than good…

> Now people will start wondering if a module with millions of installs in the last month is still going to exist tomorrow.

That's a good thing. People should be aware of it - and be aware of the fact that all awesomeness of the open source world is maintained by continuous - and often unseen and unpraised - effort of thousands of people. Who are mostly known when something breaks but not much otherwise. It's ok not to think about it every minute, but it's also useful not to forget about it completely - and that we shouldn't take it for granted as it is in no way law of the universe, it is a consequence of continued effort and continued good will.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#799

Post by auntyJemima »

overgard wrote: post #77

I think it's amusing to see this from the perspective of the company. Some guy uses your trademark without your permission so you tell him to knock it off. He refuses, so you go around him, and so he protests... by fucking over all of his users. In a dispute that doesn't involve them. And people are celebrating this.

Hey since you love authority, you realize that NPM decided to change the ownership of the kik module without asking his permission right? Life isn't black and white.

Re: I've Just Liberated My Modules

#800

Post by [deleted] »

iopq wrote: post #475
ubernostrum wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still be jailed for contempt of the order, though. "I've found a clever workaround for court orders" doesn't work around that bit.

OK, now tell me how you can remove this file from BitTorrent (it's Fedora 18 KDE) magnet:?xt=urn:btih:14f146cdfaef83951ca9d3ac647e18e1977d1367 I'll wait

[deleted]
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