Rumor: Netbook Debate Ends With A Quiet Settlement?

Gizmodo has reported that the netbook trademark debate started by Psion and picked up by Intel is finally over. Per the French site Blogeee the two companies have reached a settlement after several months of legal squabble. Accordingly, Psion all has agreed to "allow" others to use the term netbook for undisclosed considerations, if any, given by Intel.

Psion: Intel has "unclean hands," we demand $1.2 Billion

From Ars Technica -

Psion has countersued Intel, defending its claim to the netbook trademark, unveiling a somewhat suspect table of netBook revenues, and demanding triple all Intel's profits on netbook products plus punitive damages.

The countersuit accuses Intel of having "unclean hands" due to its "unauthorized... willful and malicious" marketing of netbook-branded products "with full knowledge that it has no right to use" the trademark. Psion's new filing alleges a great deal of malicious wrongdoing, and demands a jury trial to decide the awarding of statutory damages which may total well over a billion dollars, with punitive damages beside.

For a detailed backgrounder on the suit, read the full article here.

Psion: we still sell the Netbook Pro

Per jkOnTheRun, Psion has responded to them regarding its "netbook" trademark. With Dell and Intel recently filing petitions asking for the cancellation of Psion’s “netbook” trademark, citing abandonment of the “netbook” term since Psion was no longer selling the product, Psion has countered that it in fact had multi-million dollar sales of the Netbook ® Pro computer in both the US and the EU. It seems the bulk of the sales were to highly specialised supply chain logistics implementations, explaining for the lack of retail visibility. Nevertheless they still count as real sales to real customers, thus lending validity to their claim. So even if manufacturing has been been discontinued, sales apparently have not been - reinforcing Psion's stand that it has not abandoned the trademark.

More detail here.

Save the Netbooks: fighting a trademark on extinct hardware

From Ars Technica -

Save the Netbooks! is a grass-roots movement organized to fight Psion's trademark threat on the term "netbook." Back in January, Psion, which alleges it owns the term, started sending cease and desist letters to retailers, manufacturers, and websites using the netbook trademark. And recently, Psion managed to talk Google into banning the term "netbook" from being used in AdSense ads.

But now, the Save the Netbooks campaign is working on taking back the word as a generic term. Its first mission is to reverse the Google AdWords "netbook" ban and is encouraging users to go to the Google AdWords Complaints Procedure page and fill out a form to voice their opinions on the ban. There's also a Twitter account to keep users updated on how things are going and a Facebook group that people can join to show their support.

Save the Netbook campaign website here.

Save the Netbook Facebook account here.

Save the Netbook Twitter account here.

Dell fights back against Psion netBook trademark rampage

From Ars Technica -

As most of you are aware, the booming sales of compact, low-cost, and low-margin notebooks, more commonly referred to as "netbooks" have convinced the owner of that term ("netbooks") to go trigger happy back in January in threatening just about everyone in its usage. Psion, a company that stopped selling a Windows-CE-powered "Psion netBook" in 2003, threatened journalists, manufacturers, and even bloggers in order to get them to stop using the term by the end of March 2009. It even convinced Google to ban the term from AdSense ads.

But now a grassroots effort has sprung up to fight the company, and Dell is lending a hand with a USPTO petition to cancel Psion's trademark. In a petition for cancellation filed at the USPTO, Dell puts forth three logical reasons for nullifying Psion's "netbook" trademark: abandonment, fraud, and genericness.

You can read the complete article here, including pertinent PDF links.