kik
Azer Koçulu is an open-source developer who had been publishing and maintaining his packages on npm for other developers to use and include in their packages. Out of his ~270 packages on npm, one of them was called kik, which helped programmers set up templates for their projects.
Kik also happens to be the name of a freeware instant messaging mobile app available on both android and iOS, from the company Kik interactive based in Ontario, Canada. Kik Interactive contacted him objecting to his use of the name, for which the company claimed intellectual property rights, and asked him to change the name. When Koçulu refused, Kik Interactive contacted npm management, who agreed to transfer ownership of the module to Kik without Koçulu's consent. Koçulu then unpublished all of his modules from npm, including a popular eleven-line code module called "left-pad" upon which many JavaScript projects depended. Although Koçulu subsequently published left-pad on GitHub, its sudden removal from npm caused many projects (including Kik itself) to stop working, due to their dependency on the Node and Babel packages.
In view of widespread software disruption, npm restored Koçulu's left-pad and made Cameron Westland of Autodesk its maintainer. The incident sparked controversies over the assertion of intellectual property rights and the use of dependencies in software development.