Silly patent fights
Lawyers drool over a big harvest of oranges
Silly patent fights
If ?being orange? weremade a crime, Id cheer. Half the population of TV presenters in the UK and the more irritating half, too would only be able to get on air during prison visiting hours.
That said, among the people who are orange, and famous for it, EasyGroups Stelios is prominent.
And the news that Orange, which is also famous for being orange but also for being black and white is thinking of suing Stelios for being orange, is news that brings a warm glow to the heart, because it would be some revenge for all the people who called themselves ?EasySomething? and who got sued by EasyGroup as a result.
What makes the joke fun is that Stelios is going to do EasyMobile, or something similar. And of course, hes said that his trademark orange colour will appear on the phones. Orange says this is ?passing off? his service as theirs. Well, theres not a lot you and I can do about that. But it would be nice to see these hyper-litigious corporations wasting some of the money they refuse to hand over to us needy publishing types on more worthwhile projects.
So heres my suggestion… we set up a scheme to encourage this activity. All we need to do is get contributions from people in more than one EU state. That makes it an International Event, and qualifies it for EU subsidy.With these funds, we start up several limited companies at less than G 200 each and register a few domains, and paint them all orange.
For example, www.ezorange.com isnt taken. Admittedly www.ezphone.com is registered, but only
by a professional domain reseller. And the people at www.ezmobile.com use a different alphabet which means theyre legitimate targets and anyway, they forgot to register www.ez-mobile.com so serve them jolly well right. After a few hours in the Prince of Orange pub (in Dover, Kent) thinking up other plausible domain names and before EasyStelios and EasyOrange sue the pub for its name or colour or… oh, didnt I tell you? Yes, indeed! Stelios has registered EasyOrange.com as a domain.
Careless of him. If I were the judge, I would be inclined to laugh at the idea that using the colour orange was ?passing
off? but registering EasyOrange? I would sell that domain name if I were you, Stelios…