Just because they've trademarked "kik" doesn't give them complete control over all instances of that 3 letter string in the world. See the 8 factors of trademark infringement, and trademark law in general; this is just a kik lawyer being threat happy.

> Just because they've trademarked "kik" doesn't give them complete control over all instances of that 3 letter string in the world.

Agreed - hence why I looked up the actual trademark in the first place. I wasn't expecting to find out they were in the software development business too.

> See the 8 factors of trademark infringement

I'm assuming these? (Google turned up 1 hit - which in turn was 404ed - for "8 factors of trademark infringement") http://www.bitlaw.com/trademark/infringe.html#factors

Keeping in mind IANAL:

1. The marks appear very similar, with the possible exception that kik the company appears to have no meaning behind "kik". Similar enough that I have to specify "kik the company." 2. Both appear to provide services aimed at developers. 3. The plaintiff's mark appears to be strong enough to fill the first page of Google, and for overprotective parents to overreact to. 4. I was momentarily confused which kik I was clicking through to at least once.

Am I misweighing or misinterpreting things to think that the first 3 points, at least, point towards infringement? Do you agree that these appear to be among the more important ones?

"The first five of these factors are examined in every trademark infringement action." "Of these eight factors, the first two are arguable the most important."

> ... and trademark law in general

If you have any recommendations, feel free to share.

+1 also US Trademark != the whole world. NPM should have handle this better!

US trademark is what's dangerous to NPM Inc., the US company running NPM. We don't know anything about how they "handled" it before it came to this, except that they did decide against the article author. What should they have done differently?

It's not good that NPM-the-piece-of-infrastructure is vulnerable to this, maybe a registry like this shouldn't be under control of a single company, but we don't know enough to decide what options NPM Inc-the-company had.

I hope they clean up/better communicate their policies around this, once they have them figured out (e.g. the package dispute page doesn't discuss trademarks).

> What should they have done differently?

Not given them control over his code just because it had their name on it. They could have taken it down, but they didn't, they just gave some company ownership of his module, not cool.

> Is the point that kik should just give up on their company trademark?

You can't possibly think that's the point he's making. Did you even bother to read the article?