US court bars BlackBerry from using BASIS BBX trademark

The United States Federal Court in Albuquerque has
granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Research in Motion (RIM),
barring RIM from using BASIS International’s incontestable federally registered
BBX trademark at RIM’s Asian DevCon on December 7-8 in Singapore.


RIM had refused BASIS’ requests to stop the infringement
at the DevCon conference, which resulted in BASIS filing for the TRO.


In rejecting RIM’s arguments against the issuance of a
TRO, the court found that, The BBX mark is identical to the mark which RIM is
allegedly using to present its BBX product.” and “despite the fact that the two
companies are not direct competitors, the parties’ respective BBX products are
highly related and target the same class of consumers, that is, business
application software developers.”


The court went on to concur with BASIS that The alleged
infringement is likely to cause customers and prospective customers to wrongly
believe that the software applications created using BASIS’s development tools
are only compatible with RIM’s BBX operating system.”


The order described how the Courts use a
well-established four-part test to decide whether to grant injunctive relief”
and concluded that Accordingly, after considering all the factors relative to
a determination of whether an injunction should be granted, the Court finds
that all factors weigh in favor of BASIS”


By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]