[steveklabnik]

  > the trademark claim was ridiculous to begin with.

npm's lawyers disagree with you, and they're lawyers.

EDIT: cool HN, -2 for stating a fact. Sure, I don't disagree that this lawsuit is kind of silly, but npm's laywers don't think this suit is _frivolous_, which is what matters.

[hyperpape]

Given what I know about your politics and philosophy, I find it pretty funny that I have to say this:

1) As "just a fact" it's irrelevant. With some interpretation added, it contributed something. However...

2) As participants in a market economy, the lawyers' primary interest may not be the letter of the law or what is theoretically winnable in court, but what will give npm the least hassle. I'm not sure if that's the case in this particular trademark case, but we all know lawyers sometimes do counsel the path of least resistance. And maybe that's even wise. But it's worth being clear about that ambiguity, rather than just saying "lawyers said it, I believe it."

P.S. I think your comment isn't super helpful but I didn't downvote you.

[steveklabnik]

My point is mostly that often, when it comes to law, lay-people talk about what they _wish_ the law was, rather than what the law actually is. And yeah, lawyers can be wrong too. But sometimes, things that seem common-sense aren't actually legally correct, and this is one of those cases. It does feel silly that a messaging company can threaten to sue over an unrelated software package, but that's just part of how intellectual property law works.

[wolfgke]

> My point is mostly that often, when it comes to law, lay-people talk about what they _wish_ the law was, rather than what the law actually is.

That is why the law should be formalized such that correctness proofs for argumentations can be given and in doubt even be checked independently by a computer. Exactly because of the possibility of different opinions and wishes, coming up with such a high standard should be considered a maxim.

[hyperpape]

My background is in 20th century Anglo-American philosophy, which spent a great deal of time seeing how far one can push formalization or quasi-formalization of interesting concepts. I wish I had a good capsule version of why I think this won't work, but it won't. Formalization is a tool, and an important one, and there probably are areas where a more formal approach to law could pay off. However, attempting to remove all ambiguity, vagueness and subjectivity is liable to leave you with paradoxical results.

Perhaps you could start with this: to formalize any set of laws and criminal procedure similar to the actually existing law, you'll have to define knowledge, and that is a quagmire (http://www.unc.edu/~ujanel/Gettier.htm--you don't have to read the entire paper, but at least read the first section for a feel of how nasty the project gets. If you need more background, here is the description of what the Gettier problem is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem).

[wolfgke]

I just read about the Gettier problem: In my opinion one should better model knowledge as some kind of estimators for probabilities and being justified on some statistical criterion. This should in my opinion avoid the whole Gettier problem (but perhaps introduce some completely different ones?).

[mdpopescu]

I prefer the definition of knowledge given by Orson Scott Card, if I'm not mistaken: something you believe to be true. It doesn't have to be justified and it doesn't even have to be true - you just have to believe it.

I know that the Moon is about 400,000 km away from the Earth. I have never measured the distance and I haven't even tried to check if it's plausible: I read it somewhere and accepted it as such.

[steveklabnik]

While I can appreciate this sentiment, I'm also not sure that removing any sort of interpretation is a good idea. Look at the horrible impact mandatory minimum sentencing has had, for example. Flexibility can be bad, but it can also be very good.

[wolfgke]

> Look at the horrible impact mandatory minimum sentencing has had, for example. Flexibility can be bad, but it can also be very good.

That is rather an argument why in doubt one should not put such harsh punishments into the law - a thesis which I support.

[cyphar]

There are a near-infinite set of complexities in legal cases. Trying to create a formalism for such laws would require solving the entire field of ethics to decide at which point something might be considered "reasonable doubt".

[wolfgke]

> to decide at which point something might be considered "reasonable doubt".

As far as I know this is a mostly done problem (google "statistics").

[cyphar]

I don't think you understand what "reasonable doubt" means in a legal setting (Google "reasonable doubt").

[smsm42]

> they're lawyers.

Which means if they say "it's very serious threat" and the code gets deleted everybody would think they are serious lawyers even if the claim looked ridiculous - because you see, lawyers said it's serious and who are you to argue?

On the other hand, if they ever say "it's ridiculous" and then they get sued, they could be fired or at least suffer damage to their reputation for not preventing it.

Thus, there is exactly zero incentive for the lawyers - at least ones acting purely according to near-term incentives - to ever take even a minimal risk and declare anything like that ridiculous. They have all incentives to always react as if it was 100% genuine infringement - because that costs very little and has no risk.

Some lawyers and companies are more civic-minded and reject some ridiculous requests and take risk because that's the right thing to do. But you can not require people to be heroes.

On the other hand, we are not lawyers, so we have all the incentives to proclaim how ridiculous the whole thing is.

[jonatanheyman]

There's a huge different between an actual lawsuit and the threat of a lawsuit. Kik's lawyers were being bullies, and NPM caved in, instead of standing up for one of their users who seem to have contributed a lot to the community.

[gariany]

3 letters of a NPM developers package? for real?? I'm pretty sure the owners of Kik wouldn't care that that developer package is named Kik. I can find 1000s of mentions of Kik online which validates the trademark. Starting from @kik on twitter to an online project of a random student.

Pursuing a NPM package names?????? for real?!

If you've ever worked with lawyers you would have known that they would always be on the conservative (safe) side without understand the business implications.

[hartator]

If npm's lawyers were Apple lawyers, I think Apple stance on privacy might be different.

[piotrkaminski]

Layers tend to be conservative, and have also been known to make mistakes. I don't think it's crazy to question their decisions.

[jsprogrammer]

Sorry, but was there actually a lawsuit in this case? It sounds more like KIK emailed some people at NPM and NPM just said, "OK", then replaced a known module with some other thing.

It's only a matter of time until NPM is socially engineered into replacing a module with something more malicious, if it hasn't already happened.

[steveklabnik]

There was a threat of a lawsuit. npm's lawyers decided that this threat was not frivolous.

[chc]

How do you know what they thought? It seems just as likely to me that they didn't see much merit in the complaint, but didn't think it was worth fighting since IP law is such a mess in the US that even clearly baseless complaints can drag on and become expensive.

[steveklabnik]

Because npm stated it publicly on Twitter.

[chc]

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.

[steveklabnik]

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

[steveklabnik]

I follow a _lot_ of their employees on twitter, and by now, I don't remember which one had the best tweet about it tbh.