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Nexus One Name Irks Philip K. Dick's Estate
RevWaldo writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the estate of Philip K. Dick says the name of Google's new smartphone infringes on the famous character name from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick, states Google has its 'Android system, and now they are naming a phone "Nexus One." It's not lost on the people who are somewhat familiar with this novel... Our legal team is dealing head-on with this.'"
Give me free money!
The same name can be held as a trademark by different entities if the usages don't conflict.
I see no problem here.
Yes, the headline should read - Google rips off Dick.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Longest first post evar?!
You type fast. Very fast. Too fast, perhaps. That makes me suspicious.
Can you look into this Voight-Kampff machine, please, and tell me only the good things about your mother?
The flame that burns +1, Funny burns -1, Long.
And you have burned so very, very +1, Funny Bottles.
It's still a homage. Not having a trademark on the name of a consumer electronics device is just plain stupid, business-wise. I don't think that sales of the book will be harmed by this, nor do I expect that there will be any confusion over which is which. In a good society with good laws there's no way the Dick estate would be able to get a dime or force any change based on this. Nobody asks for permission from Karel apek or his estate before calling something a robot, even though it's a clear reference, and I don't see why this should be any different.
The case of Droid is very different in that there really was an existing trademark and, though it would likely be legal use the name in another field, it's always (legally) safer to get permission.
I want my Cowboyneal
It's a freaking WORD. It comes from the DICTIONARY.
This has gone way too far, in two ways. One, we are not talking about a book, we are talking about a WORD. Two, Philip's heirs should not earn ongoing profits from work done by Philip a generation ago. Has their income incentivized them to produce anything noteworthy themselves? I think not; in direct contradiction to the whole point of congress's authority to assign limited monopolies.
Google should do two things. The should fight this in the courts, but much more importantly, they should use their considerable resources and clout to lobby congress to update the legal framework such that it encourages, rather than hinders, innovation in the sciences and the useful arts. Congress, elected by the people, has the last word on this one.
Yep, here is a fine example of it
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If they didn't trademark it, there would be hundreds of Chinese made rip-offs in months. You clearly don't understand how trademarks work.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
"let me tell you about my mother..."
-- Sig under construction...
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/android
Philip Dick has been dead for more than 20 years, time for his family to stop parasitizing on his success.
These aren't the Droids you're looking for.
Given that he has been dead for 28 years, his works should be in the public domain. Then there would be no dispute.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I don't see the problem. There is no trademark by the Dick estate. There is no copyright or trademark infringement by Google even if Nexus One had been trademarked. And it cheeses off little people such as yourself and the parasites feeding off of the Dick estate. There's no downside.
I'm now copyrighting NEXUS TWO, NEXUS THREE and NEXUS FOUR by using these in my post.
When Google brings out next generations of its phone, I'll sue them and become rich!
You gotta think ahead.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Some copyright attorney must be reading /.
As of a few seconds ago there were 30 replies, of which four or five said that the heirs should no longer be profiting from the copyrights, since Philip K. Dick is long dead. All of those posts have been marked "troll".
Would our budding copyright attorney like to explain this? Guess what: "troll" is not a substitute for "disagree".
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I see two problems, one is greed and the other is the brain damage the lawyers must have incurred in not recognizing the simple fact you stated.
That, or they know about it and their greed feeds off the greed of the PKD silverspoons.
If not, I'll start googling every cool word combination I've ever used online and start demand royalties. Knowing a bit about authorship, PKD probably shat them out on an assembly line and would put the spoiled brats he left behind over his knee if he found out about this, if for nothing else than their lack of imagination.
All rites reversed 2010
It depends on what they registered the trademark for. You don't register a trademark and then it's good for everything. You have to select usages and the more you pick the more it costs.
Philip K Dick did not invent the term Android or even Nexus. The name Nexus One may be a nod towards Nexus 6 but they aren't the same and one is for a mobile phone and one is a fictional character.
I don't side with them because for starters its not the creator that's complaining. It's his lecherous kids who are just being greedy. They see the Android platform taking off, they're used to getting money for doing nothing (thanks to daddy) so they think they're owed a piece of Google's business.
The people on whom the connection is not lost, would see this as a tribute from Google to Philip K. Dick. It would be sad if this sort of unbridled greed on the part of some discourages companies and people from expressing their admiration for the contributions of others.
I do not have a problem with an author's children trying to assert their legal rights --- but this would've been as wrong if the author himself had talked about suing. There is really no reason, legal or otherwise, for Google to be paying money to the Dick foundation. Trademark laws do not apply here. And, does anyone think the name is going to "help" Nexus / Android sales ? Or that there will be people who will buy the nexus thinking it is a Dick novel ? Is Google really profiting or abusing Dick's IP ? Are book sales going to be affected ?
I don't think that sales of the book will be harmed by this, nor do I expect that there will be any confusion over which is which.
Well, you're wrong. I'm never buying or reading the book now. It can't be anywhere near as good as the phone.
I think they're going to have a hard time making that case since so few people will make the connection. Dick is not one of those authors whose works are so familiar to the general public that there is likely to be any mental connection between the average person visiting a T-Mobile store and thinking about buying an Android phone and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
...Isaac Asimov's bloated corpse is suing over the Japanese robot named Asimo.
It's a real product by Rösch Company: Linux. Micro&Soft For some reason, I would call toilet paper "Micro&Soft" :-P
True, but it's not even the same name. The book refers to the replicants as "Nexus-6" models. This is the "Nexus One" phone.
Would an average person think that the estate of Philip K. Dick endorses the phone based on that? Highly, highly unlikely.
The
"Hey you should really read this book" "Nah I'm waiting for the phone to come out"
there's also osx!
slashwhat?
Without wanting to add too much to the anti-copyright vituperations, has anyone considered how difficult it must truly be for a lawyer sensing a great case such as this one, with hundreds of billable hours (regardless of the outcome) to refrain themselves from telling their clients that serving papers to one of the planet's largest corporate behemoths is the only option, when in reality they pretty much know that they are guaranteed to lose the case but will still manage to milk the estate for plenty of money by going that route, and that this will be the closest they'll ever come to being 'cool with the in crowd' ?
How Darwinian! In that sense,they are taking the role of parasite, which as we all know is necessary for the ecosystem to function properly.
This is really stupid. If anything, it might renew interest in a relatively obscure (for younger people) book. Now, it will just result in backlash as people will refuse to buy anything from Dick now. The estate has no real legal ground to stand on, and has now shot itself in the foot. Bravo!
Free digital copy of "Blade Runner" with every Nexus One (director's cut, of course). Google gets to demo the phones' video chops and gets the coolness cred, PKD's heirs get a chunk of the royalties. Win-win.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Even Motorola had the wherewithal to kindly ask Lucas before using Droid as a name for their phone because 'droid' is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd.
The clue is in the part of your own post starting "because" - even then, its debatable as to whether that trademark would apply to anything other than plush R2D2 toys.
Google applied for a trademark on "NEXUS ONE" [uspto.gov].
Yup - "Nexus 1". Not "Nexus 6". Its a dictionary word and a number. I Googled for "Nexus" and get the Tyne and Wear public transportation system, a Christian music school, a dating agency, a production company and a sponsored link to Amazon leading to a whole bunch of rather pornographic looking novels. No Dick (at least of the Philip K variety).
Now, if Google had jumped straight to "Nexus 6", launched an ad campaign featuring Rutger Hauer, and offered a free lead codpiece or a $100 mail-in rebate on a genuine goat, there might have been a case.
(Push your eyeballs out through your ears? There's an App for that!)
Where do you suppose it should stop? Should Red Hat need Paramount's permission for "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" - or Nokia for the "Nokia Communicator"? Is "Heroes" ripping off Neal Stevenson by having a character punnily named "Hiro"?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I'm not sure the estate has shot itself in the foot. If people didn't already know the book they wouldn't have known the reference, so it wouldn't have renewed interest in the book. Now they are much more likely to become aware of the book, and the extra publicity is likely to far outweigh any boycott. If (as seems likely to me, but IANAL) the estate has no legal ground, who cares? This wasn't necessarily about winning the case.
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If this goes to court, Google would better win, or else we'll be treated to a headline "Google pays Dick wads".
The book refers to several of the Nexus series, although the main focus is on the latest generation. Oh, and the book doesn't call them replicants at all, that term was invented by the movie. The book calls them androids or andys.
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Bunch of god damn parasites. PKD is DEAD. In my view that leaves his work should be public domain. Is that the law? No, the law presently favours the leeches, the parasites, the lawyers. I'm no big fan of Google as a company, but I say "go for it, Google". Fuck these people. PKD is dead. None of the people involved had anything to do with his writing or work or creativity. They are leeches existing at the pig trough of Imaginary Property rights. In a more just society they would be burned as devils.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The Chinese will probably translate "Nexus" to mean "connection point" and then mangle that to "post" in the sense of a post in a fence; "one" will then be translated as "first".
So yeah, look for the First Post phone to come out in about six months.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Actually, the word "robot" may well have been first coined in a play written by Karl Capeck in 1927, in Russums Universal Robots (or R.U.R.)- even though Russum's robots would be more along the lines of the "androids" in Dick's story.
Nobody, not even Dick, asked around to see if they needed permission from Capek for that stuff.
Mainly because they didn't NEED it.
Heh... It's even more entertaining what they're doing here...
A TESS search, while not 100% conclusive, shows 41 differing uses of the word "Android" as a trademark or part thereof, with the first usage, though dead, going back to 1959, registered in 1962 as a branding of a medicine from the Brown Pharmaceutical Company- from the TESS database entry on it:
Google seems to be the only registrant for "Nexus One"- but all THAT really is would be a combining of two common words to represent a branding of a phone. From Dictionary.com:
Simply put, there's really little to nothing for the Dick Estate to "protect" here- and I question the wisdom of the same to allow a batch of lawyers make themselves look the fool at their expense.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I suspect this may be about generating publicity for the novel. Sort of a 'reverse Streisand effect' - draw attention to what you want to promote by threatening legal action. Yes, it risks backlash, but it also generates a lot more media coverage than 'positive publicity' would. I mean, do you think /. would have posted a story called "Dick estate says honored to be recognized by Google"? Slashdot *might* have, but I bet *this* story (about a threatened lawsuit) gets to CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, NYT, Wa. Post, etc, and I'm sure that even *if* the other news outlets gave any coverage to a 'positive publicity' story at all, it would be buried in a very minor blurb or headline scroller at the bottom of the TV newscast, where it wouldn't have gotten much attention from hardly anyone.
Because of this story, a lot more people will know that Google named their phone after a character in that novel, and some of them may get curious and decide to buy a copy (or at least inquire at their public library, who might need to buy additional copies to deal with a sudden increase in people trying to check out that novel [or to replace lost or stolen copies]).
Actually, "You're a Harlan Ellison" would be a MUCH worse insult. I'm just surprised Mr. Sue-Happy hasn't gotten in with his own lawsuit, claiming that the cellphone was his idea, from one of his crappy TV scripts in the 60's.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Trademark law is intended to protect consumers against confusion about, or misrepresentation of, the origin or endorsement of a product or service. Except for fanciful marks, trademark law tends to separate fields of endeavor, so that (for example) an arbitrary or suggestive trademark for film media does not clash with the same word used as an arbitrary or suggestive trademark for tax preparation services.
PKD's estate has a long row to hoe in arguing that consumers might confuse Dick's name for a kind of humanoid robot with Google's name for a kind of mobile phone. This is especially true because those who are familiar with the former are more likely to be well-informed about the provenance of, and who has (or hasn't) endorsed, the latter.
My wife posts on slashdot now? Damn!
But a novels and phones are entirely different product categories. Therefore, no confusion is possible, and the novel and the phone can co-exist even if both are trademarks.
Furthermore, Nexus One and Nexus-6 are distinct. You don't get the trademark for one just because you have the trademark for the other.
Don't bother suing me, I've got nothing.
their greed feeds off the greed of the PKD silverspoons.
I think that if you'd bother to read about his life you'll find that PKD kids were not "silver spoons." In his lifetime, Dick won awards but was plagued by financial difficulties. Only one film based on a work of his was ever greenlighted during his lifetime, and he died four months before it was released. The financial success of PKD works is all post-mortem, and is largely the result of his estate successfully licensing his works as his works have become marketable later on.
In other words, the heirs you criticize were not born with silver spoons in their mouths; they were born to a writer who was unknown outside of the science fiction community, who hadn't had mainstream success, and took loans from other writers just to get by. His children did not grow up in wealth, living off a successful, creative father who sent them to boarding school, etc. It is because there have been films since Blade Runner, that the works of PKD have enjoyed success outside of the pages of science fiction magazines.
This doesn't make the PKD heirs' lawsuit right in this case, but you can't put them in the same boat as say the heirs of the Walt and Roy O. Disney, both of whom were ridiculously financially successful within their own lifetime and were able to pass on that fortune to their children, such as the late Roy E. Disney.
Actually, I think "Google rips off Dick heirs" works even better.
Those posts are *certainly* (-1, Offtopic), given that the copyright status is irrelevant to determining a trademark dispute. Even if others should be able to sell Dick's works, that doesn't mean the original rightsholder would stop, and therefore a potential trademark dispute would be just as relevant (the merits of such a dispute aside).
Taking it a step further, since those posts aren't on topic in the first place, trying to bring them up in a forum where you know many people already have a strong interest and emotional association with the current state of copyright, such a comment elicits attention, distracting from the original discussion. That's trolling, although almost certainly unintentional.
You won't even be allowed to possess the sixth version of this Nexus phone on the planet Earth. It will only be for use in the off-world colonies.
Special Verizon squads have orders to destroy, upon detection, any Nexus Six phone. This is called "retirement," and is not covered under warranty.
Yes, another example is the Domino Sugar trademark infringement suit against Domino's Pizza. The court found in favor of Domino's Pizza (i.e., not infringing). And this was a case of two food products. The key test is whether the same name use is "likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive." If a court thinks there's little chance of confusing pizza and sugar, I think Google has a pretty good chance that someone won't confuse a fictional book character and a telephone.
However registered trademarks trump unregistered trademarks every time.
Plus there is no common market here, so there is no infringement. It's certainly not copyright infringement either.
What the hell ever happened to plain old flattery? Why does everything have to be an insult and a grievance? It's an obvious homage to Dick's work, why not accept it as such?
People are way too money hungry and lawsuit-happy these days, it's pathetic.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller