RIM sued for trademark infringement for BBX OS

Rich Fiscus
21 Oct 2011 2:13

A New Mexico software company is suing Research In Motion for trademark infringement over the name of their new mobile OS.
BASIS International develops and sells a programming language called BBx. BBX is also the name chosen for the new RIM OS which merges their older BlackBerry OS and more recent QNX.
On the surface, it seems like BASIS' trademark infringement claim is shaky. Trademark protection isn't universal. It extends only to products which compete in the same market.
BASIS Chairman and CEO, Nico Spence claims the two products are, in fact, in the same market. In a statement released the day after RIM's announcement, he said:

We have thousands of product licenses installed worldwide with the 'BBX' prefix that run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other proprietary UNIX OSs from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and SUN, with mobile clients running Apple iOS, Google Android, and Windows Mobile. We are fielding numerous customer inquiries voicing their confusion about the RIM announcement.

RIM is not the first company to get into a smartphone related trademark dispute. In 2007 Apple was sued by Cisco over the iPhone name.
However, in that case the two products shared significantly more similarities. Cisco's iPhone trademark was for a line of VOIP phones.
The 2 companies eventually reached a settlement, allowing both to use the iPhone name.