Nigerian firm sues One Laptop Per Child
p2pnet news | Freedom:- A Nigerian company based in the US has filed patent infringement complaint against Nicholas Negroponte (right), One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPC) and its “enablers in Nigeria”.
Lagos Analysis, with a subsidiary called LANCOR Management, says it filed the lawsuit in the Federal High Court, Lagos Judicial Division holding at Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria, “as a result of OLPC’s willful infringement of LANCOR’s Nigeria Registered Design Patent # RD8489 and illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes for use in the XO Laptops”.
LANCOR, “is seeking substantial damages as well as a permanent injunction to prevent OLPC from continuing to unlawfully manufacture, sell, distribute or offer for sale the XO Laptop, and any other products infringing on the RD8489 and using the illegally acquired keyboard driver source codes,” says a statement.
The company says it pioneered the development of, “advanced physical multilingual keyboard technology using four shift keys and characters with combining properties to allow for direct access typing of accents, symbols and diacritical marks during regular typing”.
“LANCOR’s technology named Shift2 keyboard technology has been used to create a new class of region specific based keyboards called KONYIN Multilingual Keyboards, which are currently on sale globally,” it states.
The lawsuit claims OLPC bought two KONYIN Multilingual Keyboard models, “with the express purpose of illegally reverse engineering the source codes for use in OLPC’s XO Laptops”.
‘Change equals risk’
To add to OLPC’s troubles, “A lack of ‘big thinking’ by politicians has stifled a scheme to distribute laptops to children in the developing world,” the BBC has OLPC spokesman Walter Bender saying.
Politicians are unwilling to commit because “change equals risk,” he says, according to the story, which goes on:
“In an interview with the BBC, Nigeria’s education minister questioned the need for laptops in poorly equipped schools.
Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku said: ‘What is the sense of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don’t have seats to sit down and learn; when they don’t have uniforms to go to school in, where they don’t have facilities? We are more interested in laying a very solid foundation for quality education which will be efficient, effective, accessible and affordable.”
The previous government of Nigeria had committed to buying one million laptops.
World leaders and corporate benefactors, “jumped in to support the nonprofit project” but, “nearly three years later, only about 2,000 students in pilot programs have received computers from the One Laptop project,” says the Wall Street Journal, going on:
“An order from Uruguay for 100,000 machines appears to be the only solid deal to date with a country, although Mr. Negroponte says he’s on the verge of sealing an order from Peru for 250,000. The first mass-production run, which began this month in China, is for 300,000 laptops, tens of thousands of which are slated to go to U.S. consumers. Mr. Negroponte’s goal of 150 million users by the end of 2008 looks unattainable.
“Mr. Negroponte’s ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea. For-profit companies threatened by the projected $100 price tag set off at a sprint to develop their own dirt-cheap machines, plunging Mr. Negroponte into unexpected competition against well-known brands such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.”
Says Charfax:
Intel’s agreement with the OLPC Foundation included a ‘non disparagement’ clause, under which Intel and One Laptop promised not to criticize each other, according to Nicholas Negroponte in the latest article in the Wall Street Journal.
Still Intel tactics have violated that repeatedly to kill OLPC efforts in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, India, China and Intel is also still trying to pull those tactics in Mexico, Brazil.
This is simply disgracefull of Intel, scandalous.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
statement – Lagos Analysis Corp. (LANCOR) Files Lawsuit, November 27, 2007
BBC – Politics ‘stifling $100 laptop’, November 27, 2007
Wall Street Journal – A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions, November 24, 2007
Charfax – Intel: doing the dirty on OLPC, November 26, 2007
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for the download, and here for details. Click here or here to learn how to by-pass censorship in your area.
November 29th, 2007 at 8:06 am
It’s really just a stupid idea anyway.
Like the guy said, “why do we need laptops when we don’t have chairs to sit in?”
Computers don’t achieve social change.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:22 am
“Itâs really just a stupid idea anyway.
Like the guy said, âwhy do we need laptops when we donât have chairs to sit in?â
Computers donât achieve social change.”
Of course everyone knows chairs achieve social change.
Unfortunatly chairs cannot be made just anywhere, they need to be manufactured in factories in locations with extremly low pay scales.
My grandfather has this weird story where he claims chairs were once made from wood, not plastic. I had to report him to the anti-corparation police for his anti-plastic retoric.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
I believe that one laptop per child is a great idea and I believe that It will catch up once a critical mass is achieved. And yes computer can bring social changes. It already has by sreading knowledges.
Thank you Nicholas for doing this for the sake of humanity.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
By the way their keyboard driver patent is BS because it has many prior arts easy to demonstrate, most of them more than 27 years old when the handheld calculator developed. Ha!
Suing Nicholas will cause their patent to be invalidated.
All his needed is a good lawer. Ha!
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:54 am
Check with OLPC before spreading false patent infringement rumors:
Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed.
The founder of Lagos Analysis Corp., Ade Oyegbola, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990 and served a year in prison.
Source: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/12/01/one_laptop_per_child_orders_surge/