Just today we saw BBM Canada taking RIM into the court of law for allegedly infringing on the trademark it holds on the word ‘BBM’ and now RIM has officially released a statement in regards to this issue.
Read on for more.
The statement goes on as follows:
RIM Media Statement – BBM Trademark Litigation: December 23, 2011
“Since its launch in July 2005, BlackBerry Messenger has become a tremendously popular social networking service. In 2010, RIM started to formally adopt the BBM acronym, which had, at that point, already been organically coined and widely used by BlackBerry Messenger customers as a natural abbreviation of the BlackBerry Messenger name. The services associated with RIM’s BBM offering clearly do not overlap with BBM Canada’s services and the two marks are therefore eligible to co-exist under Canadian trademark law. The two companies are in different industries and have never been competitors in any area.
We believe that BBM Canada is attempting to obtain trademark protection for the BBM acronym that is well beyond the narrow range of the services it provides and well beyond the scope of rights afforded by Canadian trademark law. RIM has therefore asked the Court to dismiss the application and award costs to RIM. Further, for clarity, RIM’s application to register BBM as a trademark with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is pending and we are confident that a registration will eventually issue. The inference by BBM Canada that CIPO has refused RIM’s BBM trademark application is quite frankly very misleading.”
Okay so as RIM says that RIM and BBM Canada are not from the same field and there’s not even a connection between the working of the two, so this patent thingy is just a not-such-big issue.