Friday, February 20th 2009
Dell Sends Petition for Cancellation of the Netbook Trademark
Dell has filed a petition with the United States Patent and Trademark Office requesting that Psion's "netbook" trademark must be canceled. In the petition for cancellation Dell puts forth three logical reasons for nullifying the "netbook" trademark - abandonment, fraud, and genericness. Psion Teklogix is yet to make a reply to the petition. The company has time until March 30, 2009 to do that. A copy of the petition is posted here at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board Electronic Filing System web page under number ESTTA267087.
Source:
thegadgetsite
7 Comments on Dell Sends Petition for Cancellation of the Netbook Trademark
What's Dell's interest in doing this? If the term netbook is common language, it is common language. Just like in Europe we say "hoover" for vacuum cleaner. What is protected is the product name NetBook, not the vernacular use of a generic collective (category) term.
Yep, Psion tecklogic have been in financial difficulties, but if they had a product, and registered the name, then that is their registration. And they own it. What is Dell trying to do? Force it to be abandoned, and then the next claim would be for THEM to trademark it? If that is the case... then that just underscores by opinion of (this type of) lawyer.
What's going on here is that Psion is a UK company, with the "inc" just a US representation. Dell is trying to muscle the Psion brand out of the US.
Seems to me that Dell has too many lawyers on the payroll in these financially difficult times and I can think of one way to save costs.
Here is a picture of the NetBook for anyone who is interested. This was the SECOND major product after the Psion 5 that ran EPOC... the software/OS that drives so many mobile phones today.
They have every right to do this, and they did steel the name.
But I think they diserver the name since they are a netbook.