Ripple Labs is facing a lawsuit in Australia brought by the financial services company, New Payments Platform Australia (NPPA) over the allegations of trademark infringement of the 'PayID' brand.
First pointed out by technology journalist, Rohan Pearce, the lawsuit was filed last week in the Federal Court of Australia New South Wales Registry.
NPP Australia — the operator of the New Payments Platform — appears to be suing Ripple Labs in an IP case pic.twitter.com/JLfWsySzI8
— Rohan Pearce (@rohan_p) August 24, 2020
Owned by 13 banks, including ANZ, Citi, HSBC, ING, and the Reserve Bank of Australia, NPPA maintains a remittance network in Australia facilitating real-time payments between the customers of different banks.
The company launched the PayID brand in February 2018 and also spent AUD3.3 million in an advertising campaign, making the platform mainstream. Over 90 big and small Australian banks and financial institutions are currently using this platform, which facilitates payments using the customer’s email addresses, phone numbers or Australian Business Numbers.
“PayID is the brand, name, and trademark used by NPPA to identify both the NPP's Addressing Service and the account proxies/aliases that form part of the Addressing Service,” the lawsuit specified.
According to NPPA, over 5 million PayIDs have been registered to date.
Can It Be a Confusion?
Ripple has been dragged to court as it is offering a PayID branded service as a part of its Open payments Coalition (OPC) services in Australia and on-boarded three Australian clients: FlashFX, BTC Markets, and Independent Reserve. Globally, the San Francisco-headquartered company has signed 40 partners offering its OPC services.
NPPA CEO, Adrian Lovney came to know about Ripple’s PayID offering in Austalia last June, the court filing stated. It also elaborated that the Ripple’s Australian clients might “have assumed, incorrectly, that the Ripple PayID service is affiliated with that supplied by NPPA.”
