The future will be better tomorrow - Dan Quayle
|
|
|
Dell calls foul over Netbook trademark
BOX BUILDING BEHEMOTH DELL is picking on poor beleageured Psion, trying to prise the last thing of any value the British company owns out of its dying fingers.
The pioneering PDA designer and builder, which fell on hard times when palmtop computers stopped being a niche market and before they became a gloabal phenomenon, copyrighted the term 'Netbook' way back in the 1990s.
Now Dell thinks the term has become generic and has asked lawmakers in the States to wrest it from Psion's grip so the rest of the world (ie Dell) can use it freely.
Dell's men in grey suits are insisting that the company hasn't actively used the trademark name since 2003 and has no intention of creating any new products under the moniker in the foreseeable future.
The Texan company has even gone so far as to accuse Psion's senior project manager Herb Turzer of lying when he said that his company was still using the term as recently as 2005.
Dell's intentions are unclear, however, as declassifying the trademark would leave it open reregistration. We wonder who might be first in the queue to grab that one?
Until now, a number of manufacturers which have used the term 'netbook' (with varying uses of daft capitilisation) in their marketing campaigns have reportedly been asked to cease and desist by Psion Teklogix, the Canadian company born out of the ashes of the original Brit firm, though no formal legal action has yet been taken. µ
Tags: Dell
Share this:
Share
And it isn't like Dell not to file trademarks itself. A trademark search costing £35-£50 would of sufficed and the marketing whiz-kids could of come up with something better than netbook, ULCPC or sub-notebook.
If Dell is going to try and get the Netbook trademark removed then can they please take the patent away from Apple for multi-touch?
Why does the story say "copyrighted" when it's about a trademark? It's bad enough that the audience confuses copyright, trademark, patent, and rights in musical performance, but we don't want the Fourth Estate muddling us further. And, while I am going on, "gloabal"?
Re-reading my earlier comment, I see I was sharper than is appropriate, or do I mean blunter. This is quite an interesting story, what are we to call the things that we'll be passing on to the kids this time next year, and good work. Thank you. I mean it's not like I pay for your news (should I????)
Thanks for the link.
Don't mean to be picky but there's some errata:
- We weren't aware they were dying but maybe they are and it's not for us to say.
- It's a tradmeark, not a copyright.
- Dell's men in grey suits are actually women
- The sworn statement was 2006, not 2005
- The mark will be unregisterable if freed from Psion. Dell are either being a white knight or want to avoid being sued for using the term themselves (since the rest of the community is)
Cheers for spreading the word,
Save the Netbooks
Notebook - not a note book. It's a laptop, and IDK why it's not called a laptop.
Netbook - not a book, or a net book. Netbook is more like a description of the Amazon reader thing.
Someone should spend this weekend working out a new word for small-laptop, it could just make you a fortune.
My suggestions are:
minibook, netlap, nettop, mininet, portanet, lapnet, minilap, cybernet, minicyber, cybermini, micronet...
I think that any of those could catch, and maybe some of them already exist ;-)
cloud computing, any one?