A court in Brazil’s Pernambuco state has rejected Spribe’s trademark, copyright, and unfair competition claims against NSX Brasil, the Flutter-owned company behind Betnacional. The ruling covers Betnacional’s use of an Aviator-branded crash game supplied by Aviator Studio, capping several months of litigation over who can use the name and its associated intellectual property in Brazil.
The court found that NSX hadn’t infringed Spribe’s trademark or copyright and hadn’t engaged in unfair competition, which makes this a decision on the substance of the claims rather than another interim ruling. The full judgment, including the court’s detailed reasoning and any appeal deadline, hasn’t appeared yet in the reports available on the case.
Spribe sued NSX after Betnacional started offering a separate Aviator-branded game attributed to Aviator Studio. Its argument was that Betnacional had been an authorized distributor of Spribe’s own Aviator title since 2022, and that the rival product improperly used the same name along with similar visual and audiovisual elements. NSX sits inside Flutter Brazil following Flutter Entertainment’s acquisition of the Betnacional business.
That same Pernambuco court initially sided with Spribe in April, granting an interim injunction that ordered NSX to stop using the Aviator name and any identical or confusingly similar signs. The order leaned partly on Spribe’s Brazilian trademark registration with the National Institute of Industrial Property, treated at the time as valid and enforceable.
A federal court in Brasília upended that in June by provisionally suspending the legal effects of the registration. It ordered Spribe not to claim exclusivity on the basis of registration No. 501759803 while a federal invalidation case brought by Aviator Studio Brasil continues. With the trademark registration behind the original order no longer enforceable, the Pernambuco court revoked Spribe’s interim injunction in July.
Spribe tried to challenge the Brasília decision through a Motion for Clarification, and Judge Arthur Pinheiro Chaves rejected that request earlier this month. Any challenge to the substance of the original ruling would need a different procedural mechanism, the judge said, which leaves the preliminary suspension of Spribe’s trademark rights in place. Further review before the Federal Court of Appeals is still available.
São Paulo courts have separately turned down Spribe requests for urgent measures against Aviator Studio itself, with first-instance and appellate decisions letting Aviator Studio keep operating while the wider Brazilian trademark litigation runs. The new Pernambuco judgment deals with NSX specifically and settles nothing in the federal case over whether Spribe’s Brazilian trademark registration should ultimately be cancelled.
Outside Brazil, Spribe has been doing considerably better. A Maltese court granted it a provisional injunction earlier in September covering its EU trademarks and ordering several Aviator Studio entities to stop using allegedly infringing branding across the European Union. The UK High Court had already given Spribe interim relief blocking Aviator LLC from launching a competing Aviator-branded crash game in Britain while a separate intellectual property case heads toward trial.
The Brazilian side of all this stays split across several proceedings. Spribe has lost its substantive claims against NSX in Pernambuco and can’t currently use its suspended trademark registration to claim exclusivity anywhere in Brazil, while the federal invalidation case in Brasília remains unresolved. Whether Spribe will appeal the Pernambuco judgment hasn’t been publicly confirmed.