Dell claims Netbook is generic: Potter Scientific Innovations or Nothing claims otherwise
By Gareth Powell
PSION, of which you have never heard, claim it owns the title to Netbook. Dell is suing the company so that the name is called generic.
I have had several of these small PSION machines. They look nothing like a Netbook. If anything, they look like the Palm Pilot or the hand-held Hewlett-Packard HP 200LX of blessed memory.
Now PSION is in a legal battle with Dell over the name Netbook. Note that Dell is not claiming it for its own. It is mere claiming, correctly in the view of most people, that PSION has no rights to the name, that it is, indeed, generic.
Psion, which started as an English company and the initials mean Potter Scientific Instruments or Nothing — the founder was an eccentric called David Potter — is a company that stopped selling a a Windows-CE-powered ‘Psion netBook’ in 2003.
Using that somewhat flimsy base, Psion has sent cease-and-desist notices to everyone threatening journalists, manufacturers, and even bloggers in order to get them to stop using the term. It even convinced Google to ban the term from AdSense ads. Psion says it is ‘reaffirming’ its trademark and wants the freedom to perhaps make one in the future which is most unlikely.
Dell has submitted a petition for cancellation filed at the USPTO which gives PSION some rights in this daft rampage.
Dell puts forth three logical reasons for nullifying Psion’s ‘Nnetbook’ trademark: abandonment, fraud, and genericness.
Psion was issued its netbook trademark in relation to “laptop computers” on November 21, 2000, but Dell points out that Psion is not currently selling laptop computers under the netbook trademark.
In fact, Psion discontinued the only line of netbooks it ever sold in 2003, but regards its use of the trademark to be only ’somewhat reduced’ due to the accessories it still sells for those machines.
Dell’s second argument—fraud—is perhaps the most salient.
The computer maker notes that Senior Psion Product Manager, Herb Turzer, swore to the USPTO in 2006 that his company was still using the netbook trademark ‘in commerce on or in connection with all goods listed’ in its registration. Turzer also stated at the time that Psion ‘has used [its] trademark in commerce for five (5) consecutive years after the date of registration.’
This requires examination.
Psion may have actually filed for the trademark in 1996, but it was only awarded the mark in 2000. Dell argues that Psion’s discontinuation of its Windows CE netbook in 2003 constitutes fraud on the part of Turzer’s statements.
Dell’s third argument is generic. Netbooks — the ones people actually started buying, anyway—started appearing in 2007 with Asus’ Eee PC. Other manufacturers, like Dell, Saumsung, Acer, HP, and even Sony, have since followed suit with their own netbooks, but the generic use of the term may even stretch back to 2006’s OLPC.
Psion has until March 30, 2009 to respond to Dell’s petition.
In fact, the history of this very odd company is well known to me and most British journalists.
Yes, there was a a company called PSION, which developed the Psion Organizer as well as a whole range of more advanced, clamshell-design Personal Digital Assistants. They were interesting, eccentric, eclectic, expensive and did not sell very well. And then probably only in Britain.
The business started to fall apart and it did a deal so that it became Psion Teklogix operationalized in Canada with its Head Office is in London. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
I saw the first Psion, which was made around 1984 and they had certainly died by the end of the century.
Psion was established in 1980 as a software house with a close relationship with Sinclair Research — which was run by Nutty Clive Sinclair — who also made some very odd machines like the Z81.
David Potter remained managing director until 1999 and currently is still chairman of the company
1984 saw the first Psion Organizer, which can lay some claim to be the world’s first handheld computer. Then came the Organizer 2 which ran with its own new multitasking operating system called EPOC which, it was said, stood for ‘Electronic Piece Of Cheese’.
There was a Series 5 Psion for sale in 1997, a completely new product but it died the death.
In 2000 Psion acquired Teklogix in Canada for £240 million, and merged its business-to-business division, Psion Enterprise, with the newly acquired company. Teklogix was re-branded Psion Teklogix.
Psion Teklogix, based in Mississauga, Ontario, first filed for a trademark on the term netbook in 1996 and began using it in 1999, and amended it in September of 2000.
In November of 2006, Psion Teklogix renewed the trademark with the U.S. Trademark Office, according to documents from the USPTO.
Dana C. Jewell and Anna Kuhn, the attorneys who filed the petition for cancellation for the Round Rock, Texas-based Dell, allege that Psion Teklogix should lose the trademark because the company abandoned it, committed fraud and that the term has become generic.
The first two claims filed by Dell with the USPTO are closely linked. In order to keep a trademark active a company must re-register it with the USPTO every five years and show that they are, in fact, actively using the trademark.
In its petition for cancellation, the Dell believes that Psion Teklogix ‘is not currently offering laptop computers under the netbook trademark.’ Dell also argues that Psion intends ‘not to resume the bona fide use of the Netbook name in the ordinary course of trade.’ Dell believes those assertions show that Psion has abandoned the trademark.
The most damaging claim by Dell might be the claim of “genericness.” When a term becomes a common part of the lexicon, a trademark loses its power, a phenomenon Toms call “Genericide.”
Dell is claiming that there is no other way to talk about netbooks.The term ‘netbook’ has become generic in that the primary significance of the term to the relevant public is as the name for small and inexpensive laptop computers.
According to CNN If the claim of genericness is upheld, the phrase netbook would become free game in the industry.
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February 24th, 2009
Herb Turzer is no fraud. Let’s keep him out of jail