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Netbooks Popular Enough For a C&D From Psion
Kevin C. Tofel writes "After watching the netbook industry explode from nothing to 14 million sales in year, the time is right for Cease & Desist letters. Psion, a UK computer company that years ago sold a small sub-notebook called a netBook, is starting to protect the term. At least one netbook enthusiast site received a C&D for using the 'netbook' term and others are sure to follow. The site was given three months to stop using the term. Ironically, it isn't the enthusiast sites that coined the popular term. In the spring of 2008, Intel dubbed these devices netbooks to help define a market for their low-powered Intel Atom CPU."
Hey uh, unlike patent and trademark trolls, apparently Psion are still using the trademark, which they did come up with on their own before anyone else.
The only jerks here are you and your knee.
--
BMO
If you search here for the term "Netbook", 18 entries come up, one of which is a live trademark assigned to Psion. It's interesting that neither Intel nor the various manufacturers and retailers marketing computers under the term "netbook" took the trouble to do this simple web search.
Bruce Perens.
Actually it's not garbage, they own the Trademark and are entitled to protect it.
/.
This is not some dodgy submarine "patent", it's well established Trademark law. Any commercial operation in the same situation would do the same. Even
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
It's just a Cease & Desist letter. They have also, reasonably IMHO, given them 3 months to stop using their Trademark.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Read that again. This time with emphasis on the words jerk and knee.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Why is Psion not suing cnet, etc, for misusing the term? ... For a counterexample, see "Blackberry," who sued about the BlackJack phone for being too similarly named.
Asked and answered. There's presently no possibility that someone could buy a small computing device made by cnet thinking it was a product having the characteristics of a Psion netBook.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
That's not really the same. The EU is big on protected designation of origin, for things like Champaign (sparkling wine), Cognac (brandy), Parmigiano (cheese), etc. Those, like Cheddar (cheese), are locations, not a phrase trademarked by an individual or company.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
FWIW, the first thing I thought when intel started using the word was "Huh? did they buy psion"?
Though I'm in Europe where Psion for a long time was where Palm was in the US in the PDA market. Maybe psion are/were much better known over here. Symbian used in many, many phones is also a direct descendant of the EPOC32 OS that the Psion netbook ran.
Not publicly. My experience has been:
1) Notice (or be notified of) a copyright or trademark offense.
2) Try to contact the company.
3) Get a reply from person 1 who:
a) Doesn't have the power to fix anything.
and/or
b) Doesn't care.
4) Go back and forth with person 1 for a few months.
5) Deal with person 2..n who:
a) Took over for person n-1 when they:
i) Quit.
ii) Went on vacation or maternity leave.
b) Is person n-1's supervisor or someone from a completely different department in another time zone (and who can't change anything or doesn't care).
This goes on for several months until I send an angry certified letter to the president of the company or hand the matter over to my lawyer.
It's quite possible that Psion are a gaggle of jerks. It's also possible that they've been trying to get this resolved privately with no joy.
Tell that to the south where you can order an orange coke or a grape coke or a mountain dew coke...
Psion used to be a wonderful company with innovative software and hardware engineering, and excellent customer service. Back when the Sharp Wizard and Casio BOSS were the (dismal) state of the art in pocketable computers, they leveraged their expertise in industrial data-collection devices to produce a vastly superior (but inadequately marketed) handheld computer called the Series3. The rock-solid software they developed was the basis for the Symbian OS that runs so many smartphones today. I was a very pleased user and promoter of the Series3 and its successor the Revo/Mako, which I nursed along for years after they stopped making them, since no other solution available (e.g. Palm, WinCE, RIM) was as powerful and easy to use. (I finally gave up and got an iPod Touch earlier this year.) And as a matter of fact, they did create one of the first "netbooks" as we know them today (a Symbian-based device which they called... the "netBook") well before Asus et al did.
But the netBook is no more... and the same can be said of the Psion I just described.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Their netbooks were basically overglorified organizers.
Their trademark is filed under "Goods and Services: laptop computers". That doesn't leave much room.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I used to have Psion Netbook. Pretty much the same idea as "netbooks now". Similar proportions, very modest tech spec, can add apps, but mostly intended to be used with the built in apps, much cheaper than a laptop.
But they were about 8 years too early to market. And they didn't sell many.
They don't currently have a netbook but thay probably see that now is the right time to resurrect the idea and call it the Psion Netbook again. And to do that they need to and have a perfect right to prevent others from using their trademark.
Everyone who says the concept and the name is obvious, wasn't paying attention back in the years when Psion was first working on this stuff. Not only was it not obvious, most couldn't at that time see it was a valid market - it was too different.
So you live near Somerset England. Cheddar That was an unfortunate example. It was brought into the common usage long before marketing was an issue.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
Yep, Psion made one and called it the NetBook. Here's a review of one of them from March 2000.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Psion isn't an empty husk. They are marketing lots of products now. Just not into the consumer market. They do industrial mobile computers.
www.psion.com
Thankfully, trademarks that become generic terms become invalid.
Not true. Coke, Hoover, Band-Aid, Frisbee, Xerox, Tupperware, etc are used by people generally to describe a class of products. And yet the trademarks still belong to the companies that originated them. They can prevent over companies from using them.
Even if what you said was true, the generic use of the term Netbook isn't that old (it only seems so in internet time). Psion certainly haven't waited too long to defend their trademark.
Another common misconception is that the "first misuse" of a trademark must be prosecuted, or that even most infringements must be prosecuted. A TM owner only has to show that they made an effort to defend their trademark in a reasonable number of cases, in a reasonable timeframe. The term "Netbook" is new -- try to find a reference before 2007. Psion is easily within the PTO's sense of a reasonable timeframe.
Anyone fighting this battle will lose. Just look at the Cisco lawsuit against Apple over iPhone: Apple had to settle despite the fact that Cisco only obtained the trademark through the acquisition of Infogear Technology. Cisco won the iPhone VPN franchise -- not likely a coincidence, and a heck of a spoil in anyone's book. And Cisco can _still_ use the iPhone trademark for its own products.
Sailed schailed. This ship is in dry dock.