<incom> Negroponte'sv foundation sued over Stolen keyboard (Modified by Geert Lovink)

Thu Dec 6 21:24:25 CET 2007

Please post. Today's news on Boston Globe and
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<http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2007/11/laptop_foundati.html>
  Laptop foundation sued over keyboard design

By the Boston Globe Business Team
November 27, 07 05:00 PM

A Nigerian entrepreneur based in Natick says the
   <http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php> One
Laptop Per Child Foundation, of Cambridge, stole his
company's design for a multilingual keyboard.
Ade Oyegbola, founder and CEO of Lagos Analysis Corp.,
or Lancor, has sued the foundation in Nigeria, where
the company's keyboard is patented.
Oyegbola said he also plans to sue in US courts.
They can either do the right thing, sit down like they
sat down with other companies and negotiate a royalty,
said Oyegbola,˜or they can just stop.
Robert Fadel, the foundationâ€™s director of
operations, said in a written statement that he would
not comment.
OLPC has not seen any legal papers related to the
alleged suit as of this time,Fadel said. â€˜â€˜OLPC
has the utmost respect for the rights of intellectual
property owners. To OLPC's knowledge, all of the
intellectual property used in the XO Laptop is either
owned by OLPC or properly licensed.
Nigeria is one of several developing countries
currently testing the foundation's XO laptop. Dozens
are being used at an elementary school outside the
capital city of Abuja. The foundation ultimately hopes
to produce the laptops for $100 or less, and sell them
by the millions to Nigeria and other developing
countries, which will give the laptops to
poor schoolchildren.
Oyegbola said his company spent seven years developing
the Konyin Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard, which can
easily reproduce the unusual punctuation marks used in
dozens of Nigerian languages and dialects.
Oyegbola said Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor who set up the
foundation, purchased two Konyin keyboards in August
2006. In early January 2007, the foundation displayed
an early version of its laptop at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A friend of Oyegbola
who owned a Konyin keyboard saw the XO laptop
  and was struck by its resemblance to Lancor's
product.
Oyegbola claims that the foundation not only
reverse-engineered his keyboard's software, but
published it on a website used by its software
  developers. ˜They took our code and made it open
source for all the world to see,Oyegbola said.
(By Hiawatha Bray, Globe staff)

<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=17774180/ 
grpspId=1705201080/msgId=712/stime=1196210144/nc1=5008827/nc2=5045821/ 
nc3=4763760>

<http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/business/x187563127>
  http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/business/x187563127

NATICK -
A Natick company claims in a lawsuit filed in Nigeria
that the One Laptop Per Child organization copied its
multilingual computer keyboard technology.
Lagos Analysis Corp. said it filed a patent
infringement lawsuit last Thursday in federal court in
Lagos against the Cambridge-based nonprofit
  group, its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and its
representatives in Nigeria.
The company claims the group purchased two Konyin
keyboards from Lagos Analysis' subsidiary "with the
express purpose of illegally reverse engineering the
source codes'' for use in the XO laptop.
"He (Negroponte) took our keyboard and basically
replicated it,'' said Walter Oluwole, Lagos Analysis'
co-president and chief technology officer.
Lagos Analysis, owned by Nigerians, is based in Natick
and has a subsidiary in Nigeria called Lancor
Management Ltd. that developed the Konyin
  keyboard. The company said it plans to file a similar
lawsuit in the United States.
The Konyin keyboard was launched in May 2006 and
started selling on Amazon.com a year ago. Several
models range in price from about $40 to
  $100. The 106-key keyboard has a second set of shift
keys. When pressed, they give users instant access to
all the different tonal marks, letters and symbols in
the Latin alphabets of languages worldwide.
Other multilingual keyboards on the market require
users to change keyboard layouts or formatting.
"We're only company in the world that has this
technology and that is why it is so unique,'' Oluwole
said.
The XO laptop - originally called the "Hundred Dollar
Laptop,'' before its price tag rose to the current
$188 - was created for poor children in developing
nations. The rain-resistant, solar-powered laptop uses
  the open-source Linux operating system and features a
high-resolution screen and wireless Internet
connectivity.
Negroponte, former director of the MIT Media
Laboratory, first floated the laptop project in 2005
and set a goal of shipping 150 million units
  by the end of 2008. A mass production run of 300,000
units started Nov. 5 at Quanta Computer in Taiwan.
But the One Laptop Per Child group has dealt with
setbacks in recent months.
According to a report in Saturday's Wall Street
Journal, Nigeria originally pledged to purchase 1
million XO laptops but so far has balked at
  buying them because of the higher price tag. Other
countries are also reconsidering their ordering plans.
Nigeria recently agreed to buy 17,000 of Intel Corp.'s
competing Classmate laptops, which cost between $230
  and $300, for its schools, according to the
newspaper.
Lagos Analsyis is seeking unspecified damages from the
group and a court injunction to stop sales of the XO
laptop while the case is litigated.
"We're not looking to handicap One Laptop, we're not
looking to tarnish them in any way,'' Oluwole said in
an interview yesterday. "We don't want to do anything
to harm his (Negroponte's) dream, but he went out of
  his way to kill our dream.''
Oluwole said the Konyin keyboard's techology is
patented in Nigeria and has a patent pending in the
United States.
The company would not disclose sales figures. Oluwole
said sales of the Konyin keyboard have been "just a
little bit under expectations'' for the first year
because of limited marketing.
Officials at One Laptop Per Child and its public
relations firm, Racepoint Group Inc. of Waltham, were
not available for immediate comment yesterday.
(Greg Turner can be reached at
<mailto:gturner at cnc.com>
  gturner at cnc.com or 508-626-3909.)

Subject: Negroponte's OLPC accused of unauthorized use
of LANCOR's multilingual keyboard technology invention
in XO Laptops.

----------------
  www.lancorltd.com <http://www.lancorltd.com/>

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