It hasn’t been a great month for the company behind Blackberry, what with a huge number of data services going down across the UK and Europe, and receiving a lot of grief on Twitter while they scrambled to fix the issue. Now it seems they’ve landed themselves in the middle of a lawsuit.

Blackberry makers Research in Motion, or RIM as they are more commonly known, are being sued by a software company over their choice of name for their new operating system, BBX. BASIS International Ltd, an international software house that has been in existence since 1985, is not taking RIM’s product announcement lying down.

RIM have announced BBX as the name of their yet to be released Operating System that will be used on future smart phone and tablet devices. However, BASIS already own the trademark on BBX for use in conjunction with computer software, computer programs and associated tools and documentation, and they have always been careful to protect it.

According to Nico Spence, the BASIS Chairman and CEO, RIM's intended use of the brand name is in clear breach of their established trademark.

“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.”

BASIS claims that since RIM’s announcement detailing their new plans under the BBX name, they have received a number of inquiries from confused customers questioning the relationship between the two companies, and asking if BASIS’ products are only compatible with this one operating system.

So what about the domains? Perhaps understandably, bbx.com is owned by neither company. This was registered back in 1995, prior to BASIS launching their BBX product. Interestingly, the domain name bbxblackberry.com is also owned by someone unconnected to RIM, and currently directs to a standard Google holding page. So it looks like that will be another legal battle down the line!

The filing of the lawsuit followed a legal threat made by BASIS last week. It seems that RIM were either unresponsive, or at least uncooperative, which lead to the suit being filed at the US District Court of New Mexico.

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