Two strange things I heard on April Fool's Day

T-Mobile has claimed ownership of the color magenta, sparking public outcry like the artwork on Dutch website freemagenta.nl, and websites going magenta in protest. While this was real and not an April Fool's joke, this whole situation is a bit overblown, because trademark law is very strange, and color trademarks are both rare and specific in scope. UPS has a trademark on the shade of brown they use for all their trucks and packaging, but they can't sue me for selling a bike in that color... however they can sue a bike messenger for delivering things on it. The weird thing about trademark law is unlike copyrights and patents, if you don't protect a trademark you lose it, requiring trademark holders to file endless frivolous lawsuits to defend their marks (google for Intel suing a yoga workshop). Patent and copyright holders are almost better off keeping their intellectual property a secret until somebody infringes on it and they can spring out from the hole they were hiding in and demand a cut.

The stupidest thing I heard this week though had to be that there's a group of students calling restaurants to discourage them from offering bottled water, because Dasani is draining local water tables in India to bottle water destined for the US market, and this is causing a drought and destroying crops. Seriously, there are people out there so moved by the spectre of bottled water being shipped across Indian and Pacific Oceans to Portland or Long Beach and then trucked to Minnesota that they joined an organization to fight it. I assume this had to be a scam or just an early April Fool's joke (I heard it from a concerned restauranteur that morning), but I can't believe there are people who think that Coca-cola bottles coke locally, but ships in bottled Indian tap water for their Dasani brand. Please, nobody suggest ot these people that housing prices always go up, that p/e ratios don't matter, or that a nuclear superpower will never default on its debt, lest they start some sort of global liquidity crisis.