New Mexico company claims trademark infringement over BBX name.
Software company BASIS International Ltd yesterday filed a lawsuit (pdf) against Blackberry maker Research in Motion over the company’s choice of name for its new Blackberry operating system, following up on a legal threat it made last week.
Research in Motion announced its next generation Blackberry BBX last week, and BASIS says it immediately began receiving confusing inquiries from its customers. BASIS provides software development tools that allow people to write products not tied to a particular operating system, including multiple mobile platforms. BASIS calls its products BBX.
In its suit, BASIS writes:
After RIM’s public announcement of its BBX operating system, BASIS began receiving inquiries from confused customers. In addition to the inevitable confusion created by RIM’s use of the mark BBX for related goods, customers and prospective customers are also likely to wrongly believe that software applications created using BASIS’ development tools are only compatible with RIM’s BBX operating system, thus impairing and destroying BASIS’ reputation for providing software development tools for cross-platform development.
This reminds me a bit of Apple licensing the iOS and iPhone names from Cisco.
Gnanes says
They can still rename the OS. They can rename it to BBQ.