Basis International Ltd. has followed through with its threat of legal action against Research in Motion. The company filed a complaint in New Mexico Federal Court asserting trademark infringement over BBX, RIM’s upcoming operating system for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets.
The Albuquerque-based software company owns and develops the BBx operating system-independent language, database, and toolset, which it trademarked in 1995. It contends that RIM’s use of BBX is “causing great confusion for the worldwide Basis community and could potentially harm Basis’ reputation for enabling cross-platform application development.”
RIM styles BBX with all capital letters; Basis uses a lower case x.
“While we’ve been reasonable when others have attempted to use the name, RIM’s use is a clear conflict, especially given the recent addition of the Browser User Interface (BUI) capability to our BBx product,” said Basis chairman and chief executive officer Nico Spence.
He added that Basis has 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, as well as mobile clients running Apple iOS, Google Android, and Windows Mobile (pictured).
“We are fielding numerous customer inquiries voicing their confusion about the RIM announcement,” Spence said.
Research in Motion has not yet had the opportunity to respond.
Related links:
RIM’s announcement of BBX – http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5230
