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Following some excellent comments on my previous post concerning recent attempts by Psion to remind everyone they have the term “netbook” under trademark, (not under copywrite, as I wrongfully stated previously) I read the clarification that Psion sent to jkontherun about the issue.

Origin, the company representing Psion’s intellectual property, makes a fair stab at clarifying that they are only going after people that appear to be profiting from the term Netbook, and therefore are trying to convince vendors and resellers to stop using the term Netbook. They also seem to have dropped all element of threat from what they are doing, appealing rather to the fairness of these companies in order to “curtail” their use of the term Netbook.

This seems to me to be still fairly quixotic, but definitely a wiser move then attempting to squash all use of the term Netbook to refer to small computers on the web.

As illustration, I post the following Google search after the jump, entered today….

28 MILLION appearances of the term Netbook….that would be an awful lot of lawsuits. If Origin (and thus Psion) REALLY tried to press that point, someone should tell the RIAA that Psion could use some PR tips from them. Just going after shopping instances may be a bit more doable, as below I show the listings on Google Shopping only for Netbook.

Just 5,470 people trying to sell something called a Netbook. Practically a drop in the bucket. Still, it will not be an easy task, as the term has gotten pretty well accepted over the last year and right up at the top of this search are Dell and Lenovo. That is not exactly the third party resellers that Origin inferred were their main target in their clarification. It is still not clear what stance they will take in the end towards the overwhelmingly wide use of Netbook by consumers and tech aficionados…but certainly Psion’s recent moves may go down better with the tech community if Psion actually released a new cutting edge device…hint hint.

Zealot (476 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).