RIM apparently hit with “swift legal action” for their use of the BBX name

RIM officially announced and demoed the new BBX platform a couple days, one that will combine “the best of BlackBerry and the best of QNX”. This will be an important transition for the company as their future smartphones will be powered by this OS. However, amidst all the excitement also comes some possible trademark issues.

BASIS International, “a big little software company”, apparently has the trademark rights for “BBX” and they don’t agree with RIM using their name. BASIS currently has their “BBX” product running on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and since RIM introduced BBX there has been “great confusion” from “numerous customer inquiries”.

According to the press release BASIS “has taken swift legal action to preserve and protect their longstanding ownership of the BBx trademarked operating system independent language, database, and toolset. Research In Motion’s (RIM) press release announcing a new BlackBerry operating system (OS) named “BBX” is causing great confusion for the worldwide BASIS community and could potentially harm BASIS’ reputation for enabling cross-platform application development.”

Nico Spence, BASIS Chairman and CEO, does note that although he’s protecting their company, he also believes there might be some synergies. “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”.

RIM has also responded to the claim and they haven’t received anything yet form 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.”

Source: Business Wire
Via: CrackBerry