RIM Sued Over BBX Trademark

Research in Motion future appears gloomier than ever, as the company is hit with legal actions against the BBX trademark and possibly for the last week's BlackBerry outage.

More and more disgruntled enterprise customers are determined to take legal actions against RIM, unhappy by the company's compensations, which were announced a few days ago.

If that wasn't enough, BASIS International, a company that claims the ownership of the BBx trademark is now suing RIM to protect its trademark.

Unveiled two days ago, RIM's BlackBerry BBX is based on the QNX OS and aims to unify smartphones and tablets platforms in a single universal operating system.

However, according to BASIS International, the company has loads of product licenses installed worldwide with the “BBX” prefix that run on Windows, Linux, Max OS X, as well as on other proprietary UNIX OSs from many companies, including IBM, HP and SUN.

Furthermore, the company states that its BBX trademark is now part of many mobile clients running Apple iOS, Google Android, and Windows Mobile. 

Those who are unfamiliar with BASIS' line of businesses should know that one of its main products, the BBx is an OS-agnostic language that currently runs on multiple operating system, Java platforms, as well as JavaScript-enabled browsers.

According to BASIS, BBx is not limited to just BlackBerry phones and tablets powered by RIM’s “BBX.”

“Ironically, BASIS’ BBx may aid RIM in its quest to grab a share of the application market for mobile devices in that any application created with BASIS’ BBx for the Android or iOS mobile devices will also run on BlackBerry products,” said BASIS Chairman and CEO, Nico Spence.

Surprisingly for a company that issues a statement two-three days after its services are down, RIM has already addressed the claims from BASIS:

“RIM has not yet received a copy of the legal complaint described in Basis International’s press release, but we do not believe the marks are confusing, particularly since our respective companies are in different lines of business.”

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