Nigerian Company Sues OLPC

d0ida writes on the continuing troubles at the OLPC Association. Adding to the recent difficulties — the BBC has picked up the litany — a US-based, Nigerian-owned company has now filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against OLPC. Lagos Analysis Corp. claims that OLPC "made unauthorized use of LANCOR's multilingual keyboard technology invention in XO laptops." The suit was filed in Lagos.

Comments

He's in Natick, only 19.2 miles from OLPC!

[r00t]

1 Timber Lane, Natick, MA, 01760, USA
phone 339-987-9249, fax 508-647-4702

Put that into Google maps and have a look.
It's a house on a 100 foot square lot.

If this helps

[GrEp]

Some keyboard internationalization research I did a few years back:

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~crb002/ie574final.pdf

I bet it kicks their designs all the way to Timbuktu, which isn't too far from Nigeria :)

Re:A _little_ more info on this.

[d0ida]

Check out the comments on that OLPC News article. There are links to more details of both designs.

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[ozmanjusri]

As pointed out in a later post, the OLPC project in Nigeria is basically charity.

In a related article, Gerald Ilukwe, the general manager of Microsoft Nigeria, said that the cost of software is not important, even though he admitted that the average annual salary in the West African country is only $160...

what this is

[r00t]

First of all, it's a design patent. It's not a utility patent. Design patents are used for stuff like the flowers on the handles of your silverware. (why that isn't done with copyright I don't know) Design patent rules are different from utility patent rules.

It's about using two extra shift keys for the non-ASCII characters. On his keyboard, he calls them "Shift2" and "Ng". This is a nice way to do languages that use the latin alphabet with a few abnormal extra characters.

It's not like the mode switch key used for Arabic. There, you press the key once to switch modes. (more like a caps lock)

It's not like the dead keys often used for European accents. There, you press an accent key followed by a letter key. The accent key does nothing until you press the letter.

It's not like the combining accent keys used in Microsoft Word. There, you press the accent key after the letter key. (so the software must display your "A" before knowing if it needs an accent)

It's not like the fancy stuff used for Chinese, etc.

He's claiming that two keyboard layouts are in violation. The first one is Nigerian, now used for all of western Africa. The second one is "US International", which is QWERTY plus stuff like the Euro and various odds and ends.

Re:what this is

[rxmd]

It's about using two extra shift keys for the non-ASCII characters. On his keyboard, he calls them "Shift2" and "Ng". This is a nice way to do languages that use the latin alphabet with a few abnormal extra characters.

It's not like the mode switch key used for Arabic. There, you press the key once to switch modes. (more like a caps lock)

It's not like the dead keys often used for European accents. There, you press an accent key followed by a letter key. The accent key does nothing until you press the letter.

It's not like the combining accent keys used in Microsoft Word. There, you press the accent key after the letter key. (so the software must display your "A" before knowing if it needs an accent)

It's not like the fancy stuff used for Chinese, etc.

It is like the use of the right Alt key on European keyboards to get extra accented characters. The key is called "Alt Gr" on many European keyboards. On a German keyboard, you press Alt Gr + some other key to get things like the Euro sign, the backslash, the pipe character, the tilde character, curly braces, or the @ sign.

I've written a couple of keyboard macros back in the WordPerfect days that used Alt Gr plus other keys to get extra accented characters for transcription of Arabic (and, ironically, for Yoruba, which is one of the major languages of Nigeria), which I'm ready to submit as prior art if it should have to come to that.

Patent Troll Hater for 2008

[renegadesx]

I am pretty sure there are only a few ways to do a multilingual keyboard. It should not be something that you can patent.

Not only do I think this patent shouldn't be valid but these guys are suing whats basically a charity organization? Please!

As far as "not listening to nigerian law" it should be noted that they have an american office and they are suing in american courts using manipulating the flawed american patent system

I think some of your presedential hopefuls should make patent trolls an issue and establish a policy to fight against them.

Re:Boy, did they pick the wrong mark

[QuantumG]

umm, among US lawyers he's considered a big wheel too ya know. He clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. He defended Phil Zimmermann in the investigation of PGP by the spooks in the US government. And he's a tenured law professor. If you're going to take free legal advice from anyone, you could do a heck of a lot worse.

the layouts are quite different

[m2943]

Here is the US international layout for OLPC:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Keyboard_layouts

Here is the Konyin layout for the US (you have to click on VIEW LAYOUT under UNITED STATES):

http://www.konyin.com/?page=home&menuitem=1

Maybe Konyin thinks that they invented making additional languages/scripts/special characters available via additional shift characters, but that's ridiculous; here is the Windows US International keyboard layout:

http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/US-InternationalLayout.html

See, lots of special characters via AltGr.

Nigeria != Niger

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever is tagging, I don't know if it's an attempt to make a race joke or what, but Niger and Nigeria are two separate places.

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[samwichse]

I don't know that this company is actually abusing patent law. It seems like they have an actual invention (a type of keyboard + software that makes it easier to type in "weird" characters). The article even clearly points out that they have a product with this feature they sell.

Is that a patent troll? Doesn't sound like it.

I'm not sure about their choice of targets or especially their heavyhanded response to a charity organization though. I can only see this gaining them significant negative publicity and potentially torpedoing a good project.

Product Link

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[pipatron]

I use this on my Thinkpad in Ubuntu. Pressing for example ^ while holding down the right Alt, enters the "put a ^ on the next character" mode. Right Alt + " + o gives ö. I think it's called "Compose" or something.

Pretty much necessary since I'm Swedish but I want a US keyboard since the retards that decided where to relocate all the keys necessary for programming placed them so you had to break your fingers to access the [ ] { } / \ | when you use a Swedish layout...

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[rbanffy]

In other news, Microsoft will announce the licensing LANCOR keyboard input-method technology that is scheduled to be included in future versions of Windows. The amount being paid will not be disclosed, but we will all suspect it will be enough to fund these trolls for years.

IIRC the MIT Lisp machines had keyboards with "hyper", "super", "meta" and "greek" shift keys. That should be considered enough prior art (although I don't know if Nigerian law agrees with that).

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[Anonymous Coward]

Sinclair ZX Spectrum has multiple shift keys, too.

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[hey!]

So the question becomes what is claimed novel about the invention?

It's not the modality of the input -- thats a very old idea to anybody who remembers the non-gui interfaces.

For example, in Emacs the sequence control-x, 8 means the next character is interpreted in "Compose Character Mode" -- a mode that seems to be a superset of the mechanism in question. In ISO Accents mode the various modifiers work more or less as described in the invention.

So it can't be using the keyboard modally to insert characters that is novel. Nor is the idea of special additional keys that can be used in combination to alter modes (e.g., the alt key).

So the only potential thing left is dedicating a key specifically to this function.

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are they going to get all these books from? I haven't been able to find very many up-to-date and legally obtainable textbooks on the internet, so you can strike that off. Well, you're not looking very hard...

Fiction Books
http://www.baen.com/library/
http://www.anothersky.org/
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
http://manybooks.net//
http://www.archive.org/

Audiobooks
http://www.librivox.org/

Textbooks
http://motionmountain.dse.nl/
http://textbookrevolution.org/
http://www.theassayer.org/
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#languages
http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/Technology/OpenContent/opencontent.htm
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/
http://cnx.org/
http://globaltext.org/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

Encyclopaedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/

Scientific Journal Articles
http://www.plos.org/journals/index.html
http://www.doaj.org/
http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/

...This is just a sampling. There are many free online resources.

Re:Better yet, just don't send them

[MrHanky]

One would imagine Nigerian schoolchildren are taught Nigeria's official language, English.