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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."
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.
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
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."