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Cease and Desist: the netbook war of words

Posted by Sander_Marechal on · 2 comments
iTWire; By Davey Winder 		Mail this story
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Netbooks are popular, hugely popular in fact. Everyone from Dell through to Toshiba has joined the Eee PC goldrush. Everyone but Apple, that is. Steve Jobs has made it clear that he has no real interest in the netbook market, if recent reports are to be believed. One company that did have an interest, long before anyone else, was the British outfit Psion which launched the very first 'netBook' way back in 1999. Then things went pretty quiet from Psion, until now. Even at the height of the netbook media feeding frenzy at the start of the year, when the Eee PC dominated the headlines, Psion was keeping quiet. But now it appears that Psion is getting busy, and vocal, about how it has the trademark on the term netbook and is prepared to defend it.

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Comments (2)

vainrveenr ·
One of the actual Cease and Desist letters against the commercial usage of "netbook" is partially reproduced at http://jkontherun.com/2008/12/23/netbook-enthusiast-web-site... (site still up as of 1800 UTC, December 29th, 2008). Note the interesting fact that this C&D notice was "Sent by e-mail only".

The English-language 'Origin Intellectual Property Consulting Home Page' is http://www.origin.co.uk/home.htm and Origin CEO Peter Langley's profile is as follows:
Quoting:Peter Langley is a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England & Wales, a Patent Attorney and a Trade Mark Attorney. He is the founder of Origin and has been voted one of the top 40 technology lawyers in the UK.

Peter advises many leading European technology companies, including Symbian, TomTom and ARM, as well as many younger companies like Spinvox and Cognima. He also has extensive experience advising financial institutions on intellectual property matters and has advised leading North American financial institutions on patenting finance related innovations.

Peter has extensive experience in protecting computer related technology. He is also Visiting Professorial Fellow in Law at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary College, London University.
(from http://www.origin.co.uk/bios.htm#langley )

Obviously, a legal mind with immense experience.

One of Langley's last U.S. talks was "The new breed of Patent infringement Plaintiffs: are they a good thing? An economic perspective" given at the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) Annual Meeting on Thursday 18th October 2007, and held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. The Oxera paper of this talk, co-authored by David Bottomley, can be found in PDF-format at http://www.origin.co.uk/papers/Oxera.pdf . This paper and other writings at Origin's 'Briefing Papers, Books and Articles' ( http://www.origin.co.uk/papers.htm ) make fascinating legal reading on par with PJ Groklaw's continued analyses.

.... and speaking about Groklaw's PJ, it would almost seem to be an immensely fortuitous timing-opportunity for these particular C&D notices against "netbook"-using companies, given that legal IP-expert PJ is "obviously having a well deserved break" starting December 21st; exactly two days prior to the top-linked C&D notice (see 'A harvest of filings', http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20081221184714164 )

Anyone else on the coincidence of the timing of these C&D notices ??

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Sander_Marechal Story submitter ·
Quoting:Anyone else on the coincidence of the timing of these C&D notices ??


Not me. That just sounds way too contrived. Besides that, the case is pretty clear cut.

(a) Does he have a trademark? Yes, probably. He would be stupid to go into this if he hadn't. (b) Is the trademark still valid, or has he lost the rights because he didn't step up sooner? That's for a judge to decide.

Also, this doesn't really have much to do with FOSS or open standards. I doubt PJ would have written about it much.

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