Psion countersues Intel over netbook trademark, asks for $1.2b in damages
Well, this was sadly predictable. Following filings by Dell and Intel with the USPTO requesting that Psion's "netbook" trademark be canceled, Psion has filed a $1.2b countersuit against Intel, claiming that the chipmaker knew Psion owned the netbook mark but used it anyway. That's interesting because Intel's efforts to push "netbook" on the industry went basically nowhere from March until June of 2008 -- when Atom-powered laptops ran amok at Computex -- but we're guessing Psion doesn't care. As it has in the past, Psion claims that it's been selling Netbook-branded machines continuously since 1999, along with some interesting sales figures to back it up -- as Ars Technica notes, the numbers seem to add up oddly at all the wrong times, with $2m of Netbook accessories sold in 2006, three years after the product went off the market, and just 4100 total Netbooks sold over 10 years. We'll see how the court decides to pull all this apart -- it's certainly starting to look like a showdown's brewing, but we're still convinced that Intel and Dell have money, time and momentum on their side here.
