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Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

kodfabrik.com

361–370 of 530 posts

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regards to the trademark issue: > and we’d have no choice but to do all that because you have to enforce trademarks or you lose them. They aren't threatening him for the fun of it, this is classic trademark stuff. Also the "solution" he offered them was: > Yeah, you can buy it for $30.000 for the hassle of giving up with my pet project for bunch of corporate dicks Would _you_ give this guy $30,000, after he call…

Good luck trying to enforce trademark law for namespace on a public code repository. It’s “classic trademark stuff” insofar that people classically don’t understand what a trademark is or how it’s enforced. Consider reading through Github’s policy on trademarks[0] to better understand why a casual fuck off should be given whenever you get misleading, threatening emails. [0] https://help.github.com/en/github/site-poli…

I agree with you. And I don't understand this normalisation of threatening.

And just because it's a lawyer does not make things better. If you want me to cooperate, try to be nice. If you threat me, don't be surprise to hear a 'fuck you'.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#363
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.

Ah, this might seem like a joke but it's true.

I was part of a student association when I was an university student.

Part of the activities was to host gnu/Linux courses record them and upload them to YouTube.

One day, out of the blue, the channel goes dark and nobody knows why.

We all panicked. We had received no warnings and there was no way to appeal.

In the end, we asked some former students that were employed by Google to pull some levers internally, and we managed to get our channel restored.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed that permission and were denied again. Only after the story got a lot of publicity did Google decide to accept it.

Did PB fall through the cavernous CS cracks or are they competition?

Chrome + Android are busy building a competing feature and that's part of the narrative about Pushbullet - this was seen as an attempt by Google to kill a competitor through nebulous "rules violations".

If the PB team hadn't gotten it to be as visible as it was, they very likely would have gotten away with it.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right to use that name in a certain context. Kik was a dick. 30k is a lot, but lawyers would’ve cost way more than that

An initial consult is often free, and even a $500 consult would have been worth every penny because the lawyer would have (correctly) told him to back off and let them have the name. In any event, escalating - even when you think the other party is being a dick - is never the right answer.

An initial consult is often free

If you're hiring a lawyer off a television commercial in order to make a quick buck off of a fender bender. Corporate law is different.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#366

Another victim of the Chrome Extension AI. Seems like the PR move of last week was nothing beyond that, a PR move. I expect them to backpedal again like they did with Pushbullet, but it's too late now.

But thousands other will perish

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#367

Maybe they're still angry with him about leftpad. Yes, it really is the same guy: https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules . And, joking aside it would be wise to bear in mind that we're reading only one side of the story here. As with leftpad, there's another side to this. With leftpad he told Kik, "fuck you" ( https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breakin... ), and then wrought gl…

He's got a pretty good shitbird radar.

Npm not only didn't realize that this guy was more important to their community and NodeJS on the whole than a one off from Kik, but they sold out to GitHub / M$FT.

All that for something that hasn't been updated in 2 years https://www.npmjs.com/package/@kikinteractive/kik

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#368

I get it, Google loves to automate stuff to save money. Makes sense, I agree. But I'm seriously wondering if all the people in charge of automating such processes are those delusional ego-programmers who think they can solve anything with machine learning, aka "AI". Really, I cannot understand that there aren't basic safeguards in place like "hey this extension got repeatedly flagged and when a human finally reviewed…

The other explanation is that they don't really want users to have most browser extensions. The browser extensions either become features that google wants to embed in the browser, or things they don't want, for business reasons. In either case it is better if the extension dies after a year or so. BTW, this doesn't have to be a conscious choice of anyone at Google, it could just be the way the incentives turn out.

A bookmarking service sounded to me like something Google wanted to operate themselves, and I was thinking maybe that was related to why it got taken down.

At the same time, it seemed to not have had that many users yet, so, a bit early for Google to pay attention?

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An initial consult is often free, and even a $500 consult would have been worth every penny because the lawyer would have (correctly) told him to back off and let them have the name. In any event, escalating - even when you think the other party is being a dick - is never the right answer.

An initial consult is often free If you're hiring a lawyer off a television commercial in order to make a quick buck off of a fender bender. Corporate law is different.

When I was sued I was able to get an hour with many of the initial attorneys I called. The biggest challenge in most cases was ensuring there were no conflicts.

And as an attorney, if I go back into practice someday, of course I’ll do the same.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time seeing your position here. Because of their actions they broke their own build and made a lot of folks in the open source community upset. Was it even worth it to waste the time fixing their broken build? To investigate the failure and replace a dependency of a dependency? To lose credibility in the community they've evidently just decided to become involved with? I really don't see how that's not…

It is a principle of American and English law that the person who uses someone else’s property unlawfully is responsible for the foreseeable injuries caused to others by its use - not the lawful owner of the property.

You are being downvoted because you fundamentally misunderstand and mischaracterise the situation you are referring to.
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