Dell, the well known PC maker, on Wednesday filed with a petition with the Patent and Trademark Office, under which it sought to cancel a registered trademark for the term "Netbook" by a company called Psion.

Psion is a Canadian mobile computer maker, which owns the trademark "Netbook." It also has sold a product called Netbook in the past. Late last year, Psion commenced sending some tech bloggers and Netbook makers' cease-and-desist notices, under which it asked them to stop using the term "Netbook."

However, Dell has come forward to take a legal step under which it has accused the company of failing to defend it properly. Dell says that Psion has not used the term "Netbook" for any of its products for the past six years.

The step taken by Dell seems to be a fair one as Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Samsung, MSI, and many others too have been using Netbook as a blanket term to describe small form-factor laptops with low-power processors, usually Intel's Atom chip, for over a year.

Basically, Dell has three products dubbed as the Inspiron Mini 9, Mini 10, and Mini 12, which fall under Netbook category.