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Dell Accuses Psion of "Fraud" Over Netbook
Barence writes "Dell has issued court papers in the US, accusing Psion of fraudulently laying claim to the term netbook. Psion sent out warning letters late last year to PC manufacturers, retailers and bloggers alike, asking them to stop using the term netbook, which the company registered as a trademark in the late 1990s. But in a Petition for Cancellation of Psion's trademark, the PC manufacturer accuses Psion of abandoning the term and fraudulently claiming it was still in use. 'Psion is not currently offering laptop computers under the Netbook trademark,' Dell's petition claims. The petition also claims that Psion made false statements about its use of the term Netbook in a sworn declaration to the US Trademark Office."
meh, everyone and the dog use the term netbook referring to small laptops. once is in the public domain manufacturers can call it pre-laptop chiqui-laptop pico-laptop pixie-laptop and still when someone goes into the store he will be asking for netbooks.
Yeah, this should work out well. Just about as well as NCR's right to use 'Tower' ... sigh
These marketing people might as well start trying to trademark things like 'desk' 'pen' or 'screen'.
Now, if it were about the trademark "Dell NetBook" or "Dellnetbook" or something similar that would be a different matter. Netbook is just too generic and descriptive to even be given a trademark. period. Why do we keep doing this?
We all call them Kleenex, but they are facial tissues. If someone had tried to trademark 'facial tissue' we would be in the same ballpark here.
It is sad that people argue over such things, even more sad that they have the money to waste arguing over it.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Can you really make someone not talk about your product on a blog? Simply using the word netbook on your blog can get you in trouble?
THL phish sticks
It's pretty easy to claim your own arguments are honest and insightful. Perhaps There Is No Cabal.
Wow. That timeline just makes this whole thing completely retarded. Asymetrix abandoned it in much less time than it took for Psion to hand out these letters. And when Psion wasn't even the first company to take this word, I wouldn't expect a reasonable person to see any sort of strength in these letters (IANAL, but I did do a law intro course in high school).
The term "netbook" hasn't been associated with Psion for as long as I can remember. I first heard the term "netbook" when it became an accepted generic term for halfway between a laptop and a thin client a few years back.
People seem surprised that Psion is still around, and I bet this lawsuit just runs them the rest of the way into the ground when they have to pay losing legal costs.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
How does the similarity of 'netbook' to the generic 'notebook' enter into this?
Screw all this! Let's just call them all Kleenex!
I sort of mean that as a joke, but at the same time, the word "NetBook" has become so commonly used that it doesn't actually matter if PC makers stop using the term -- PEOPLE will continue using the term. Psion already lost unless of course they are actually interested in collecting money and not using the mark. This, of course, would be bad faith...
What about RollerBlade? AquaLung? I'm sure there are many more if you search hard enough. Those are two generic words combined to be unique and trademarked name. Netbook was a valid trademark name too. Whether it is today is a whole different story.
You know who else lost WWII?
Some moderators must really be in a foul mood today--it seems nearly everything's being labeled as "Offtopic." I think your question is valid since most people who skimmed the posting might be compelled to wonder the same thing (and this is Slashdot, after all, so no one's going to bother reading the article, right?).
What I'm curious about is why Psion waited so long to start sending out notices. I always thought that if a company felt it had reasonable grounds for defensibility with regards to a trademark, they wouldn't sit on their hands for months at a time. It's almost as if they were waiting to see how well netbooks performed in the market before deciding it was time to vie for a cut of the profits (probably via lawsuits). It's a conspiratorial notion, sure, but in this day and ages where patent trolling firms sit on mountains of paperwork vaguely describing some generic mechanism without any capacity for manufacturing the product on their own, sue others who "infringe," and then make their profits from settlements or royalties... it's not too far fetched!
He who has no
I did. I'm sure I left it around here somewhere...
The difference is those guys vigoriously defended their trademark as soon as they saw it being misused.
Psion sent out C&D letters only after netbook became widely used. There's a case for Psion abandoning their trademark and for the term being generic.
Trademark isn't like patents. You can't troll a trademark. You need to nip trademark infringement in the bud, or if it becomes too widespread, you can be perceived to have abandoned it, and the term can become generic. In fact, you can protect your trademark from abandonment by acknowledging and allowing 3rd parties to use your trademark. But you'd still run the risk of it becoming generic.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Psion, for over a decade, sold cool PDAs that were well ahead of their time and very useful. Then Windows CE came along, Psion ran away and Windows CE almost totally abandoned the keyboarded PDA concept. That's why we've had a five year gap, followed by a line of machines that badly implement the concept with X86 processors and XP or Linux. It's good Psion have noticed this. But they have done the wrong thing. Notable examples of Psion wonderfullness: AA battery compatibility, programming language on-board, basic office suite, communications support. Given this was in 1990 - that's cool. And it was all in a package half the size of a book. Now we have 'netbooks' that are just small laptops...