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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.
Eben Moglen, invalidator of bioscience patents filed by his own university ("that is what tenure is for") is a public ally of the OLPC. I suspect he'll not only invalidate their patent, he'll drive em one step from bankruptcy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What's even more silly is that a patent is supposed to describe exactly how something works so people don't *need* to reverse engineer it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The "innovation" behind their keyboard is that they have more than one shift key (you know, like having an apple key; or like a "microsoft" or "super" key) and that they use the shift key to add accents (you know, like a German or Polish programmers keyboard). This is something which is beyond obvious; has been done before. Is in no way original and anyone who sues over such a thing is a Patent Troll, no matter what way they carry out the lawsuit or how long they have spent negotiating. Now, whilst I have resservations about OLPC; taking this lawsuit as it is and carrying it out against against a charity and people who are trying to do their best to help education of poor children is sick. The people behind this (and I doubt that it's just the Nigerian company doing this) deserve long prison sentences.
How are the KONYIN keyboard's multiple shift keys any different to ye olde AltGr key to access alternate - usually international - characters?
Naive Citizen of the World... You have NO awareness of geopolitics!
If they haven't bribed them, then LANCOR might well be a part of the government.
Nigeria's government will reward LANCOR for keeping their people enslaved to warlords as prostitutes and child "soldiers".
> I am trying to solve a 1st order differential equation, I would like a pencil and a paper to work this out.
The equation is: dx/dt = x + cos(x * t)*sin(x + t)
Good luck. The reality is that the vast majority of 1st order differential equations cannot be solved with pencil and paper, and using numerical algorithms on computers is the best and most general way to solve them.
But even without this, you're totally missing the point. The student's computer wouldn't be solving the equation for him; it would be teaching him how to solve it. I'm not an educational professional, but I suppose one way might be to
> I cannot how a 10 year old is going to learn maths or chemistry (for that matter, his local language) in a laptop.
Leave teaching to teaching professionals. They seem to think computers are useful tools in their trade.
The only way that could be true is if Nigeria has a seriously defective legal system (quite possible), but even then the "truth value" of that statement would only exist within Nigeria.
Like someone who illegally wears a t-shirt that says "Vote".
The phrase "illegally reverse engineered" only weighs in favor of a case of this company being a "patent troll", it is not an argument to refute that label.
A further note is that all uses of the word "invention" appear to false. According to the article this is a design patent. At least in US law, design patents are not for new useful inventions, design patents are not for functional aspects, design patents are for aesthetic and ornamental aspects. Design patents are about "our product looks cool and distinctive". Design patents are trivial to work around, you just change the shape or arrangement of your product to any of a zillion other equally reasonable equally functional looks.
...ok a little Googling and yes Nigerian RD#### patent are "Registered Design" patents. This is not an invention patent, this is an ornamental design patent. It also turns out that there is no official website to look up Nigerian patents, not only is there no website for it but the Nigerian Patent Office official contact point is a Yahoo email address.
This company is suing a charitable high-tech project to aid 3rd world children, and doing it based on an ornamental patent registered with a government operating from a Yahoo email address. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
It strikes me as remarkably inconvenient that there just happens to be a company which is US-based, Nigerian owned and happens to have a patent on something which so directly affects to OLPC project. How many companies can there be which fit this description?
Putting my tinfoil hat on for a moment, it's not possible that this company is a stooge for Intel or Microsoft, is it?
What's the date on the patent, though? This sounds no different to what the Sinclair Spectrum was doing with its multiple shift keys 25 years ago.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Lancor - hosted by ipowerweb.com. Administrative contact, bscinternational.com
... and to have their admin contact external (a MS partner BTW)...
konyin.com - hosted by ipowerweb.com Admin contact, oluwole@lancorltd.com
For an IT company to not actually have their own web server
Thoughts? How big is this company (they don't have a link on their web site to their Nigerian counterpart. They do have a link to Konyin.com, no drivers available for download there. Anyone got them?
I wonder how much email traffic has been transferred between Lancor and MS recently. SCO is sooo yesterday's news.
BTW - your lancorltd.com web site does not render correctly in FireFox.
Thank you for contacting us on the subject matter of OLPC.
I will suggest that you do the following steps below and you will come to the same conclusion our investigators and lawyers did... OLPC stole IP from LANCOR.
- Check the first keyboard layout released with the XO laptop before August
2006.
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Take it from us that OLPC purchased our keyboards sometime in August 2006.
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Now go to OLPC's http://dev.laptop.org/query and follow the development of
OLPC's new set of keyboard layouts and driver. (Take note of the first day
this development started.
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Check for OLPC's new XO keyboard layout used at the CES 2007 show.
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Now go to OLPC's wiki.laptop.org and again follow the postings of
information about their keyboard layout development and key date changes were
made.
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Now when you have all these info collated, call OLPC and ask why they
choose to remove the keyboard layouts used in the CES 2007 XO model after
September 2007.
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See if you can put together all the various versions of OLPC keyboard
layouts and match them to events you discovered from their query database.
end quoteI 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 descriptions of their keyboard, including this larger image, aren't too convincing. What they seem to have "invented" is the idea of adding a fifth "Ng" shift key to the conventional four (Shift, Ctrl, logo, Alt). They gave it somewhat unusual placement, stealing space from the usual Shift keys (and making them smaller).
But keyboards with five shift keys are hardly novel. I'm typing this on a 4-year-old Mac Powerbook, which has five shift keys (shift, fn, ctrl, alt/option, logo/cmd) at the lower left corner. The Mac puts all but the shift keys in the lower row, stealing space from the space bar
So what did they actually "invent"? Putting extra shift keys next to the usual "shift" keys? Inventing a new "Ng" label to paint on the key? Using a new keycode for the new keys?
Keyboards have been made with more than five shift keys, too.
The obvious conjecture is that this is yet another attempt to either extort money from the OLPC project, or to bankrupt it through litigation. Or maybe to just block its use in Nigeria, similar to the Microsoft bribe attempt discussed here last week.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Obviously, you sprang as a fully-formed, English-speaking adult out of Zeus's forehead or something. Or not. No, instead you're just a dumbass who doesn't realize that children can learn, and moreover that the entire point of the OLPC project is learning, and that contrary to what you might think the children are most likely capable of learning English along with everything else!
Tell you what, read this: India: Hole-in-the-Wall. Then try telling me language is a real barrier!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well... I was aiming for "Funny", not "Informative".
Anyway, you always have to think what a person/company stands to gain from an action like this. The XO is not a direct competitor of none of their products. They make keyboards and software that goes with them, while the XO is a computer governments buy for students.
Unless government purchases for schools is a significant market niche for them (I assume they sell to OEMs that, in turn, sell computers to the government - a business that would remain untouched by the XO), there is no reason for this lawsuit. The company stands to gain nothing directly from halting sales of the XO to Nigerian government.
When we start to consider this as a proxy stunt (because it is not in LANCOR's best interest to pursue it - they will spend money and, probably, get nothing but bad will in return), we end up with another question: if not LANCOR, who stands to gain from it? This is the point you can fit your preferred conspiracy theory.
BTW, everything relating to this sounds _very_ fishy - no real data as on what the patents are about, a perceived abundance of prior art and a probably non-infringing XO all point to a maneuver to divert business from one group to another by creating a temporary legal uncertainty. It smells really, really bad.
If proved without merit, OLPC should counter-sue them into oblivion.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com