RIM sues Samsung over Blackjack

Research in Motion thinks the name of Samsung’s new smartphone, the BlackJack, sounds a little too much like its popular BlackBerry line of devices, so the company is taking its grievance to court.

RIM has filed a lawsuit against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, claiming intentional disregard for the trademark of its core handheld business. “Samsung has used the BlackJack mark in a manner which is confusingly similar to RIM's BlackBerry marks,” RIM said in the filing. “Samsung is misleading the public into falsely believing that Samsung's goods and services are connected with RIM's business.”

RIM even goes so far as to claim Samsung is ripping off its designs as well as its moniker. RIM stated that the BlackJack design is very similar to the design of its new BlackBerry Pearl smartphone. While RIM has been a party to numerous lawsuits in recent years, they have all focused on RIM and other vendors’ uses of push e-mail technology. The biggest case was settled last year with RIM paying out $612 million to holding company NTP for allegedly infringing on its technology patents. This case, however, has RIM on the offensive, and it deals not with technology but trademark issues. Instead of RIM being accused of building a business off the back of another’s technology, RIM is accusing others of building a business by aping its business strategy.

RIM is by far the most successful purveyor of push e-mail enterprise phones in the U.S., but in the last year it has tried to move down the value chain, marketing the Pearl as a high-end smartphone rather than an business-centric device. Meanwhile other vendors have been pushing from the bottom to meet RIM head on. Both Nokia and Motorola have launched their own enterprise devices, complete with Qwerty keyboards and big screens to target RIM’s customers, and Samsung’s BlackJack tries to scale further down the value chain, focusing just as much on multimedia and music as it does on e-mail.

The shouting match between RIM and Samsung, however, could play out in the marketplace just as much as it does in court. Cingular, one of RIM’s largest BlackBerry distributors, has an exclusive agreement to sell the BlackJack in the U.S., which is RIM’s largest market.