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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."
Cheddar, a class of cheese we all know, is in reality a particular type of cheese, from a particular location (not too far from where I live).
Cheddar is also much less obvious a term as "netbook".
I think litigation like this should only be valid if the sales are actually hurt by watering down of the term. Since Psion probably has zero sales, they should be ignored as a trademark troll.
Also, they created Symbian, which qualifies for 147 evil points.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Because taking everything into consideration, current trademark law is probably the absolute bottom of the barrel worst law in the US. Even the USA PATRIOT Act could be justified if library records actually were linked to terrorism somehow, and who knows, maybe the warrantless wiretaps saved New York from nuclear devastation and Bush is just too bashful to admit that he did something right. But trademark law cripples everything it touches, except for the lawyers who wrote and legislated it in the first place.
First off on the ownership side, trademark dilution is bullshit. 100% Grade F extra-runny bullshit. Lego and Google should not be punished just because I play with Legos or Google for information about the weird sores I get. Any law that punishes the company because other people don't want to have to sit around and write out "Lego(TM) brand building blocks" is such blatant shit that the lawyers who thought it up must own stock in rubber wader manufacturers.
Secondly, requiring the trademark owners to sue everything that moves in order to keep their trademark is bullshit. If you use the Brand X trademark to sell your product and you aren't Brand X, then by all means: be sued into oblivion. But I think I stand for the trademark owners AND the golf courses of the world when I say that having to fuck over your reputation and shell out the cash for lawsuits just so that your trademark isn't revoked is bullshit. Don't tell the lawyers that though, they'll have some lame excuse beyond "but that's how I get paaiiiiiidddd!!1!" that will probably take half your afternoon to listen to, and then you'll get the bill in the mail the next week.
Finally, allowing companies to sue people who are not producing any product based on trademark goes beyond ridiculous. I have no idea what Psion's problem is (is their "netBook" not getting enough attention on these sites? Maybe they should send in a review copy!) but taking it out on people who aren't selling anything that anyone is calling a "netbook" is pointless and does more harm than good.
So now, what to do? I propose that we fix trademark law to do what it was intended to do: prevent people from selling goods (or providing services, see service mark) using a registered name. And that's it. How do we do it? Well, I propose we start by picking an enemy nation with an active volcano and throwing all the trademark lawyers into it. When the fire god gets angry we'll have killed two birds with one stone. Then we'll have to break whatever various treaties that force all of the nations of the world to participate in this farce. Then we pass a new law that gives companies the power to 1) Register brand names and service marks, provided that the brand name is not the name of the product (no Computer-brand computers or Operating System OS!) 2) expire brand names when they have not been used for a number of years and 3) Sue and/or obtain injunctions against people who produce products or provide services using that trademark or service mark within that field. And not a single word more.