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This article was published on March 26, 2016

Here’s a tool to help avoid that awkward moment you realize your name is trademarked


Here’s a tool to help avoid that awkward moment you realize your name is trademarked Image by: Andrea Parodi

It’s not been a great week over at JavaScript repository NPM after a trademark battle erupted between a longtime contributor and messaging app Kik, resulting in the former pulling his code and crashing thousands of websites.

But, as always in the tech community, a solution is never too far away.

GitHub user Andrea Parodi has created a simple tool to check if your NPM project name is trademarked.

You can run it across the entire site, or check out specific users.

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It’s super simple and might avoid upset in the long run, although a small row has already erupted about the dev’s choice of name for his project.

Parodi was trying to make an amusing reference to the Kik incident – turns out he’s unintentionally used a racial slur.

Perhaps everyone should just take a week off from naming things?

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