The dev could claim something like “prior art”, or whatever the alternative is for software. Suppose I trademark the name “is-odd” for a company, should NPM now hand me the “is-odd” package name? This would surely break the internet in the same way is an this case.
But see, that’s the thing. Trademark isn’t formally granted or applied for. It has to be for an established thing that has common name recognition like kleenex or band-aid. The purpose behind this is to give legal recourse for someone to defend their brand. In order to trademark ‘is-odd’, you would have to be able to show that people (society in your country really) use is-odd to refer to a class of thing you do/make/own. You could argue that Twitter as a trademark still belongs to the ass who runs the company (by extension) because everyone insists on calling it Twitter. The expression of Twitter now has no bearing on where the trademark lies, if it exists in the first place. That would be copyright.
Now, I agree that the system is dumb, but npm should also have infrastructure in place to enable renaming so that if a case comes about where a package is renamed, that doesn’t break the internet.
The dev could claim something like “prior art”, or whatever the alternative is for software. Suppose I trademark the name “is-odd” for a company, should NPM now hand me the “is-odd” package name? This would surely break the internet in the same way is an this case.
But see, that’s the thing. Trademark isn’t formally granted or applied for. It has to be for an established thing that has common name recognition like kleenex or band-aid. The purpose behind this is to give legal recourse for someone to defend their brand. In order to trademark ‘is-odd’, you would have to be able to show that people (society in your country really) use is-odd to refer to a class of thing you do/make/own. You could argue that Twitter as a trademark still belongs to the ass who runs the company (by extension) because everyone insists on calling it Twitter. The expression of Twitter now has no bearing on where the trademark lies, if it exists in the first place. That would be copyright.
Now, I agree that the system is dumb, but npm should also have infrastructure in place to enable renaming so that if a case comes about where a package is renamed, that doesn’t break the internet.