I get the distinct impression you are speaking for a complete lay perspective rather than from ANY experience with trademark law.

FYI, it's generally accepted there are five different categories of trademark, each more defensible than the next. The least most defensible mark is a "descriptive" mark. Like "facial tissue." Had the Kleenex brand chosen "Facial Tissue[tm]" for their mark, they may well have lost control of the mark because generic terms cannot function as trademarks.

The most defensible mark is a fanciful one, that is a word which does not otherwise exist (Kodak, Xerox, Pepsi, etc). Afaik, Kleenex actually is the best possible name one could choose to associate with tissues, since it is entirely fanciful (and Kleenex company has done a good job associating their name with tissues). As an aside, it is possible for a diluted mark to lose its protected status (such as with Bayer's "Aspirin" analgesic).

Netbook would probably fall under the "Suggestive" trademark category (the third most defensible category, behind Arbitrary and Fanciful). Net and Book both exist as words, but were previously not widely applied to this sort of device.

So, in conclusion, "Netbook" is nothing like "pen" or "desk," as far as trademarks go. Neither of these examples would even be registerable, unless they were referring to something they weren't (you could make a ketchup product called "DESK" or a cell phone called "PEN").

The post title/summary is misleading -- this is actually 2.5D and not 3D at all. (It works on the premise that the background is static, and obtains a matte of the background, and using subtraction to dynamically key/mask the participant from the image, and then add the user as a second foreground layer; on the viewer side, headtracking is used to gently shift the user layer to reveal background hidden behind it)

For what it's worth, I really don't care for this effect at all. I am not denigrating its inventors in the slightest; this is a novel (read: low cost) approach, and I am sure some people would enjoy having this in their iChat/AIM/skype. To me, it's the equivalent of Apple's Photobooth filters (fisheye, inverted colors, etc) -- a cheap parlor trick that seems nifty for about 5 seconds, and then becomes precipitously distracting. True 3D has its own issues with distraction and visual anomalies (leading to headaches, etc). Even the best 3D cinematographers around have to be very careful to avoid these issues (for instance, Vince Pace, who shoots 3D for James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator, etc) has plenty of headache-inducing scenes in his demoreel, and this is a guy with state-of-the-art facilities who has as much knowledge as anyone about how to do stereoscopic cinematography). Frankly, I think video conferencing is best left 2D, and any efforts toward improving it should be spent increasing framerate/resolution (and reducing lag + dropped frames).

Sony's just as evil as the next company. From what I understand, they declared the PS3 to be a "computer system" as a means of avoiding tariffs in Europe, and to do this they needed to offer access to the OS. Plain and simple. They tried this with the PS2, but it didn't offer access to the OS, and thus failed the test (as I am led to believe).