RIM, had on the eve of the recent BlackBerry DevCon named its upcoming OS for next generation BlackBerry devices as BBX. Little did it know at that time that BBX was actually a trademark registered and owned by another company in the US.
The company known as BASIS was swift to file a suit against RIM for trademark infringement. The case is still going on at The United States Federal Court in Albuquerque and in a temporary restraining order issued by the court earlier today, it has barred RIM from using the federally registered trademark of BBX.
The court, while rejecting RIM’s arguments against the issuance of a temporary restraining order clarified that the BBX mark is similar to the one which RIM had planned to use for its BBX OS. The court also added that even though both the companies are not direct competitors, their products catered to the same class of customers – thereby making them indirect competitors of some sort.
Blackberry seems to have given in to the case and has in a tweet from its official Twitter account confirmed that the name of the OS has been changed to BlackBerry 10. BBX stood for BlackBerry 10 as well (if you read the letter X as roman numeral X for10).
So, basically it’s just the brand name that has changed. The underlying meaning remains the same. While this case should have no bearing on the arrival of the new operating system, we surely hope RIM faces far lesser troubles in bringing out the first of the devices based on this unified OS that many BlackBerry fanatics are looking forward to.
[Via Crackberry]
