Posted 12/26/08 at 10:42:49 AM by Paul Lilly

According to jkOnTheRun, a UK law firm representing Psion Teklogix has begun sending out cease & desist letters to various websites demanding that the sites stop using the term 'netbook.'  The trademark attorney whose John Hancock appears on the letters claims that Psion retains full rights to the term based on a pair of laptops the company used to sell called the netBook and netBook Pro. In the letter, Langley says companies "inadvertently mis-using" the term have until the end of March 2009 to comply.

"Psion places significant value on its trademark registrations and your use of the term 'netbook' could damage those registrations," Peter Langley, a trademark attorney writes. "We are therefore asking you to cease use of the term 'netbook.'"

Psion may have a tough time enforcing its cease & desist order, as the company no longer sells either the netBook or netBook Pro, and the term 'netbook' has been widely adopted all across the web to describe a low power sub-notebook. Moreover, it was Intel, and not enthusiast sites, who reintroduced the term. Intel's Atom platform dominates the netbook landscape, and the chip maker even purchased the netbook.com domain, which currently redirects to Intel.com.

Do you think Psion will prevail in protecting the term netbook? Hit the jump and post your thoughts.

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7

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mobile, legal, netbook, uk, psion

Posted 12/08/08 at 09:25:58 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Wikipedia clearly is among the most innocuous websites and one can not imagine it being blocked by a child pornography filtering mechanism. However, the improbable has just occurred in the UK. The whole problem began when an image of a Scorpions album prompted Internet Watch Foundation’s Cleanfeed child pornography filtering system - used by many of the leading UK ISPs - to block the particular page.

Consequently, all traffic to Wikipedia from ISPs that deploy Cleanfeed beagn to be routed through transparent proxies – one proxy per ISP. Even if a single user is barred from editing by Wikipedia’s anti-vandalism system, all other users using the same proxy suffer exactly in the same fashion as most UK-based Wikipedia users are sharing a handful of IP addresses.

You can track the problem as it unfolds on this Wikipedia page dedicated to it. The IWF has stated on its website that the particular page was reported through its online reporting mechanism. After it was found unsuitable for minors, the page was “added to the list provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child.”

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3

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network, ISP, censorship, filtering, wikipedia, uk, iwf, child pornography

Posted 10/10/08 at 07:57:40 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Facebook is the most visited social network globally and Britain is no exception to this fact. The website is the second most popular website in the UK after Google UK, according to Hitwise. Its popularity in recent times can be gauged from the fact that it registered a staggering growth rate of 2905% from September 2006 to 2007. Of course, the website is probably never going to replicate its performance during that period – its halcyon days.  Its annual growth rate has come down to a more digestable level of 88%.

Its growth in the UK is certainly slowing down. There was only a 4% increase in its traffic between August and September, which is almost negligible compared to the 50% growth during the same period last year. Facebook’s average session time has also come down to 20 minutes.

Is there a message hidden in these numbers? Are social networking websites marching towards their popularity threshold?  Will there be a corrective decline in their traffic?

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Internet, facebook, Social Networking, traffic, websites, web, uk, britain, google uk