Just few weeks backs RIM (Research In Motion) CO-CEO Mike Lazaridis had announced – in BlackBerry Devcon 2011 – that the company would be going to work on new generation operating system—BBX. Everyone was excited after eavesdrop the new platform of RIM and most of them started waiting to its debut in the market. But, shockingly, the company has decided to shunt off BBX – only to rename as BlackBerry 10. The decision after the the court hearing on the litigation from BASIS.
After court decision, the company has announced that its new generation platform would be Blackberry10. BASIS had complaint several times for the trademark infringement for the use of BBX name to RIM but the company didn’t agree with their thought process somehow then.
Knowingly, BBX is a global software developer community producing innovative database products, development tools, and an application framework for the large community with the trademark of “BBX”. After the indication of rejection from RIM, the company registered its complaint against RIM in TRO.
After TRO complaint hearing the court has released its decision in the press conference, “The BBX mark is identical to the mark which RIM is allegedly using to present its BBX product (TRO page 8). Despite the fact that the two companies are not direct competitors, the parties’ respective BBX products are highly related and target the same class of consumers, that is, business application software developers (TRO page 9).” The court went on to concur with BASIS that “The alleged infringement is likely to cause customers and prospective customers to wrongly believe that the software applications created using BASIS’s development tools are only compatible with RIM’s BBX operating system (TRO page 11).”
However, this is not the first time when a company faced such litigation in mobile industry. Similar case had arisen with Apple and the company went for the legal action against Cisco for its trademark of iPhone. The company claimed “iPhone” a registered trademark of Apple and was succeeded to secure the trademark.
CEO and Chairman of BASIS—Nico Spence—complaint to TRO that, “BASIS built the BBX brand over the course of a quarter of a century to become synonymous with the term ‘operating system independent’. RIM’s unilateral seizure of that brand to use as a name for their new BlackBerry operating system is destroying that association. It’s absurd to suggest that they are not in our line of business. We provide application development tools for the enterprise, and for desktop and mobile solutions, while RIM is touting their new BBX operating system to application software developers around the world as the linchpin to their strategy for their tablet and smartphone products,”
It’s pretty clear that BASIS upsurges the mobile application that is compatible for Android as well iOS mobile devices besides Blackberry devices. However, the application made on the RIM’s BBX platform was only meant to support its Blackberry devices and surely would have created huge ambiguity in the industry. Also, the claim of BASIS is really trustworthy because RIM might have enjoyed the company’s share of the application market due to same OS name.
The court decision is obvious and RIM would not like to move up for litigation to grab the BASIS’s trademark. That’s why company has decided to change the name of its next platform as Blackberry 10. The decision of the court might affect to the company’s business in a small margin but it’s important to maintain the healthy competition for the marketers for long run.
