As if Research in Motion needed any more bad news, it has just been ordered by a judge not to use the name “BBX” because it already belongs to another trademark owner.
The three-letter name was going to be the name of a new mobile OS and would have been part of RIM’s new branding strategy as it tries to reinvigorate the Blackberry name.
But as soon as Basis International caught wind of this, it filed a lawsuit, saying that its software, also called BBX, was the target of trademark infringement.
At the time, Basis CEO Nico Spence issued a statement, saying, “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.”
US District Judge William P. Johnson in Albuquerque, New Mexico agreed. He wrote in his ruling that consumers are “likely to be confused by RIM’s use of BBX in connection with RIM’s goods and services.”
The ruling prevents RIM from using the BBX name at a developer conference in Singapore this week, and although the trademark infringement case is still ongoing, the judge indicated RIM is likely to lose.
