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People who are famous for being orange, including EasyStelios, and (of course) Orange...

If "being orange" were a crime, I'd certainly cheer. Half the population of TV presenters in the UK - and the more irritating half, too - would be restricted to getting on air during prison visiting hours.

That said, amongst the people who are orange, and famous for being orange, EasyStelios has to be prominent.

And the news that Orange,  also famous for being orange, but also for being black and white - is thinking of suing EasyStelios for being orange, is news that does bring 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 EasyStelios.

What makes the joke fun is that he's going to do easyMobile, or something similar. And of course, he's said that his trade-mark orange colour will appear on the phones.

Orange says this is "passing off" his service as theirs.

Well, there's 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 other exciting projects.

So here's my suggestion... we set up a project to encourage this activity. All we need is to get contributions from people in more than one EC state. That makes it an International Event, and qualifies it for EC subsidy. With these funds, we start up several limited companies (less than 200 Euros each) and register a few domains, and paint them all orange.

For example: www.ezorange.com isn't taken. Admittedly http://www.ezphone.com/ is registered, but only by a professional cybersquatter. And the people at www.ezmobile.com use a different alphabet which means they're 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, didn't I tell you? Yes, indeed! - Stelios has registered EasyOrange.com as a domain.

Careless of him. If I were the Judge, I'd be inclined to laugh at the idea that using the colour orange was "passing off" - but would I carry on laughing, if I heard he'd been registering EasyOrange?

I'd sell that off if I were you, Stelios...

[Archive: This column first appeared in IT Week February 28]