Intel and Dell have moved to snuff out the trademark claims of Psion Teklogix, the Ontario-based Anglo-Canadian concern that has been sending cease-and-desist letters to PC manufacturers, retailers, the media and bloggers since right before Christmas maintaining that it owns the word "Netbook."

Psion complained to Google on January 29, and ever since then Google Adwords has refused to handle any ads that include the word "netbook" in their text, effectively ending search advertising for the category.

So Dell last week asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to nullify Psion's netbook trademark, issued on November 21, 2000, for a laptop that pretty much anticipated a modern day netbook, on the grounds of abandonment, fraud and genericness.

Dell's charges mirror the ones Intel made a few days before in a 12-page complaint filed in district court in California. 

Anticipating a demand for a heady amount of damages by Psion's lawyers, Intel wants the judge to order the Commissioner of Trademarks of the United States to cancel Psion's trademark; enjoin Psion from asserting any trademark right to the term "netbook"; and - most important to Intel - issue a declaratory judgment saying Intel didn't infringe Psion's trademark.

Intel and Dell both allege that Psion discontinued using the name netbook in 2003 and claim that when Psion filed a trademark registry extension on November 17, 2006, four days before the trademark would have died a natural death, it committed fraud on the PTO.

Psion, which filed for the trademark in 1996 and apparently still sells accessories for its netbook, swore that it was still using the netbook name and that it had used it "in commerce for five consecutive years after the date of registration or the date of publication."

Intel says that's not only baloney, that's unfair competition and notes that in support of its declaration Psion attached an ad for the widget it last sold in 2003.

Although the word netbook started to come into popular use in 2007, it was of course Intel that started to promote its use last year and it is Intel that owns the site http://www.netbook.com/ pitching Atom-based widgets although, as Intel tells the court, it's not brand-specific. Some netbooks use VIA chips and Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm have designs on the space.

Intel claims that there is "no alternative term with any appreciable usage that describes the netbook category" of notebook computers that are small, inexpensive, under-powered and specifically meant to access the Net.

Intel claims that Psion had plenty of warning of the generic use of the word but "did little if anything to protect its purported rights, much less discharge its duty to police third-party uses of its purported trademark" before belatedly asserting its rights in December.

Intel lawyers tried persuading Psion that the word was generic by pointing to the 30 million hits that resulted from a Google search. Psion's lawyer interpreted that as an indication of the scale of the potential damages, writing back that "Intel aided, abetted and otherwise induced manufacturers and retailers" to use the term.