You might have seen on the internets recently that the family of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick (he wrote books or short stories that became the movies: Blade Runner; Paycheck; Minority Report; Total Recall and more) are considering suing Google over the name, “Nexus One” for their new phone. In particular, the family claims that Nexus One is too close to Nexus 6, the name of a model of android / replicant in Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

When I first saw this, I thought, geez, that’s a bit of a stretch… but then I considered that the Google’s phone OS is called Android, and Nexus 6 is the name of a model of android.  Then I thought about all the nerdy engineers at Google, and I’ve got to imagine that a good many of them are sci-fi fans and have either read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or seen Blade Runner.  When I put those into the mix, it’s conceivable that the name Nexus One is meant as an homage to the Nexus 6 which is said to be “more human than human.”  That’s all circumstantial however, and would be difficult to prove.

There’s one thing keeping me from buying that argument entirely, and that’s the actual definition of the word Nexus.  It means “center” or “focus”.  Consider that and then take a look at the logo for the Nexus One.  At first glance, you might just figure that the “X” in nexus is simply colored blue, red, green and yellow to mirror the regular Google logo… but if you look closer it’s not just a multi-colored “X.”  Those are 4 arrows pointing to the center.  It’s even more apparent that Google means center or focus by the name if you watch this promotional video for the Nexus One.  It starts with many arrows zooming in from all sides to point to the center.  It then shows a series of pairs of seemingly unrelated words, and those words are connected by the a feature on the phone which visually appears in the center of the words.

While I hate to see big corporations getting away with unfair use of other people’s ideas, I’ve got to say that this might be more coincidental than on purpose.  Hopefully Google plays nice and has a conversation with the family of Philip K. Dick regarding their name choice for the phone and they can reach a happy conclusion.

That’s just my opinion though… what do you guys think?  Did Google draw inspiration Blade Runner?