Xavier Media®

Sometime ago Psion announced that they own the right to the trademark "netbook" since 1996 and they demanded all manufacturers of the increasingly popular mini-notebooks to stop marketing their mini-notebooks as "netbooks". The background to all this is that Psion had a product several years ago called Netbook and they even registered the term "netbook" as a trademark. The Psion Netbook hasn't been produced since 2003 but they still sell spare parts to them.

If you do a search in Yahoo you get 149 million hits, and the first hit you get is a link to Wikipedia describing netbooks as a generic product:

Netbooks are light, compact, highly portable, inexpensive, and energy efficient[1] laptops.

Since so many manufacturers, like Asus, Intel, Acer and many more, use the term netbook as a generic term to describe their products (not as a name/trademark) I think Psion wont have much luck at all in stopping. I think we'll have another Xerox-incident where Xerox is same thing as a photo-copy of something and not just the Xerox copy-machines.

Google has however announced that they will help Psion by not allowing ads any more on the term "netbook" so when you search in Google.com for netbook you only get the search results (and no Adwords ads at all):

So what's the lesson learned from all this? Get your trademarks popular, but make sure people don't start using them to describe what their doing because you may lose the right to your trademark . Most of us will never have to care about this, but some of will create a popular product/service sometime…..

Something telling me that Gizmodo.com isn't going to stop using the term netbook .

Or what do you think?

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.