What do you know–just when netbooks are becoming ever more popular, Psion is now laying claims to the lightweight laptop and desktop replacement moniker. According to The Guardian, a UK publication, the term was coined when Psion launched its first “netBook” in the early 2000s; the firm owns the mark for the US, UK, and other geographic locales. Psion now wants websites that make use of the mark to stop using it, sending a cease and desist letter to blogs such as jkOnTheRun.

Psion’s netBooks were more like beefed-up PDAs with keyboards that took on a laptop form factor, rather than the concept being thrown about the blogosphere today. Today’s definition of netbook stems from a scaled down laptop computer, which eschews power and performance for portability and longevity of battery life.

Maybe we’ll have to come up with a new name for netbook computing. When Microsoft entered the PDA market, it began with “Palm PC” to later replace that mark with Pocket PC because Palm found the name too confusing with the popular Palm Pilot. However, in Palm’s defense, the company was making Palm Pilots (and are still making Palm handhelds to this day) so the issue with confusion in the marketplace is legitimate. Psion, on the other hand, had abandoned the netBook concept for a few years now.