Intel’s Turn to Get Back at Psion

Remember the issue thrown by Psion regarding their rights on the term “netbook”? This has led Dell recently to file a legal action against Psion claiming that although Psion may have trademarked the term and used it to refer to its handheld computer sometime in the 1990′s it has since then stopped manufacturing machines referring to them as netbook.

This claim was given a new support by no less than Intel which also filed a case. According to an Intel statement, the term “netbook” was already adopted by the consumers to refer to computing machines which were extensions of notebooks. In short, Psion’s claim that the term netbook is generic no longer holds true since it is now the accepted terminology for such computers.

Intel also pointed out that the despite the 30 million hits generated by the search term “netbook” on Google search results page, none of these hits created a confusion as to the real meaning of the term. In fact, none of the hits referred to Psions’ “netbooks”.