Psion has sent "cease and desist" letters to some netbook-oriented web sites ordering them to stop using the term "netbook". jkOnTheRun says: "The letters claim that the term netbook is trademarked by the firm that produced the Psion netBook in the early 2000's."
jkOnTheRun has reproduced a letter from an intellectual property law firm which says Psion has trademarks on the term in the US, EU and other places.
It's certainly true that Psion produced a pioneering product, the Psion NetBook, almost a decade ago. However, it wasn't a netbook in today's terms: it was really a Psion Series 7 organiser, a scaled-up Series 5, running EPOC not a scaled down notebook PC. (The later NetBook Pro -- launched in 2003 -- ran Microsoft Windows CE, Psion having failed to keep up with the times.)
But Psion abandoned its NetBook line long before Asus came out with the Eee PC, aka RM MiniBook, and was rapidly followed by Acer, MSI and several other manufacturers.
It wasn't clear at the time whether we'd go with minibook, netbook, or subnotebook, but clearly it was the market that decided, rather than a particular company. This suggests that netbook is just the most obvious generic term: there was nothing very original about it in the first place.
I therefore think threatened sites should be looking for pre-Psion uses of "netbook" and I won't be surprised if they find some.
I am not a lawyer, obviously, but I did once testify on behalf of a small British company that was threatened by IBM for calling its PCs PowerStation. IBM was claiming rights over the name of its Power architecture (this was before Apple used it), but I'd already suggested PowerStation, in print, as a possible name for a powerful PC/workstation. As with PlayStation, it's a completely obvious construction, and the kind of thing we do in English all the time.
Whether the argument is a sensible use of Psion's resources is another matter. There's no money in threatening fan sites, and the netbook ship sailed a long time ago. The most likely result may be that, instead of us thinking kindly of good old Psion for its Series 3a and Series 5 organisers, we think of them as litigious twits.
