Think Twice Ahead of Registering NetBook Domain Names

Popular technology gizmo is a trademarked term.

Savvy domainers jump on trends and register (or buy) popular fresh terms ahead of they go mainstream. One term that has jumped into tech talk in earnest over the past year is “netbook”. Netbooks are essentially modest and cheap laptops that travel well.

This category of laptops is all the rage, and major manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon advertising their latest netbooks.

Above: Google Trends for “netbook” searches.

There’s just one problem. It seems that the term netbook isn’t really fresh at all. A firm called Psion has a trademark the term for computers (it previously offered a product called Netbook). As it ought to, Psion is trying to protect the trademark and is calling on people to stop using the term. If the term is no longer associated with Psion’s trademark then it will be diluted. It’s sort of like how Google’s lawyers don’t want people to use the term Google as a verb. If people say “I googled it” and just mean “I searched it”, it loses its protection. (See also Scotch Tape).

Now Google is weighing in on the term. Psion asked Google to not allow firms to use the term netbook in their Adwords ads. Following investigating, Google decided to comply. (Link removed since no longer active.)

There have been a handful of domain sales counting the word netbook, counting netbooks.de ($3,222), netbooksinc.com ($5,556), and, just this month, ThinkNetbook.com $75.

I suspect Intel will buy rights to the trademark and let the industry use the term, but that hasn’t happened yet. My advice would be to tread carefully when registering any domain names with “netbook” in them, even if you don’t mean to violate the trademark.