Nigerian LANCOR to Keep the XO Notebooks Off-Shelves

The Nigerian Lagos Analysis Corporation (LANCOR) continues the patent infringement actions against Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative. The company has managed to obtain a temporary injunction against the distribution of the OLPC XO laptop in Nigeria and will continue to demand a permanent restriction with substantial money damages.

The object of the court dispute is based on the RD8489 patent, registered by LANCOR. The technology is related to multilingual keyboard functionality, that allows users create special symbols (accents and diacritics) using another set of Shift keys. Moreover, the Nigerian corporation accuses the One Laptop Per Child foundation of having illegally reversed the source code of LANCOR's KONYIN driver.

"The willful infringement of our client's intellectual property is so blatant and self-evident in the OLPC's XO Laptops," said LANCOR's legal representative, solicitor Ade Adedeji, in a statement, "we will have no problem establishing the facts of our client's case against OLPC in any court of law."

The Lagos Analysis Corporation officials stated that the legal action is based on information obtained from a public issue tracking system used by OLPC developers. The OLPC foundation works closely with Leapsoft, a Nigerian Linux distributor, that has provided them with the Linux layout files for Nigerian language support.

A comment in the issue tracking system, signed by "Shina" of Leapsoft reads: "Please find attached our keymap for Nigerian languages. One size fits all, it includes all the diacritics, and other modifiers necessary for one to type in any of the Languages. To add modifiers to the character, you press the character first, and then add the diacritic or dotbelow, by pressing the Alt Gr (right hand side of the space bar) key, and then the desired diacritic. Diacritic modifiers AFTER you type the letter. Some letters, like the special k in hausa, you obtain by pressing Alt Gr and the desired letter together."

The message only presents reference to a possible approach to getting diacritics and special characters and is far from supporting the company's accusation of copying the KONYIN keyboard model. Moreover, LANCOR lacks legal credibility, since its head has a criminal record, and served a year in prison for bank fraud in Boston in 1990.

Nicholas Negroponte's initiative aims at delivering low-cost, affordable notebooks in the developing countries, such as Nigeria and Vietnam. Big corporations, such as Intel and Microsoft have tried to sabotage the initiative and promote their own products (Intel's Classmate PC running Windows XP) on the same markets.