This reminds me of a trademark suit out of the 1980s, when the Lexis-Nexis people sued Toyota when it introduced its "Lexus" luxury car to the U.S. market. Fro

This reminds me of a trademark suit out of the 1980s, when the Lexis-Nexis people sued Toyota when it introduced its "Lexus" luxury car to the U.S. market. From a Wikipedia article summarizing this dispute: "When Toyota launched the Lexus line of luxury vehicles in 1987, Mead Data Central sued for trademark infringement on the grounds that consumers of upscale products (such as lawyers) would confuse "Lexus" with "Lexis". A market-research survey undertaken at the time asked consumers to identify the spoken word "Lexis"; the survey showed that a minuscule quantity of people thought of the computerized legal search system, a similarly minuscule number thought of Toyota's luxury car division, and an overwhelming plurality thought of a soap opera character. Mead lost on appeal in 1989 when the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit held that there was little chance of consumer confusion. Today, the two companies have an amiable business relationship, and in 2002 implemented a joint promotion called 'Win A Lexus On Lexis!'" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis) If a survey were taken today asking people to identify the spoken word "Nexus," I would suspect that responses would be all over the board, with only a very few associating it with the Nexus-6 androids (ironically, a good number might even associate it with the Nexis search service - maybe the Lexis-Nexis people ought to litigate the other half of their name, just for completeness!). Of course, the word "nexus" itself is of ancient origin, deriving from the Latin fourth declension noun ("nexus," meaning a "bond," "binding," or "fastening"). On a final trademark footnote, if a fictional character acquires a "secondary meaning" (meaning that the public strongly associates it with a particular source, e.g., "Mickey Mouse" = Disney), this can be an independent basis for infringement. Can't even begin to imagine this to have happened here, however.