LANCOR v. OLPC Case Continues In Nigerian Court

drewmoney writes "According to an article on Groklaw: It's begun in a Nigerian court. LANCOR has actually done it. Guess what the Nigerian keyboard makers want from the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization trying to make the world a better place? $20 million dollars in 'damages,' and an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria."

Why don't the Nigerians just

get their money from all those secret accounts that I keep getting emailed about.

Re:

Why is this post modded as flamebait when in all the other threads about this subject, such a comment would be a minimum +4 funny? Someone needs a sense of humour perhaps?

Re:Why don't the Nigerians just

Nigerian moderator?

Re:Why don't the Nigerians just

Dear Sir,

My name is Prince Anonoomosa C'ow-Ard of the Nigerian Royal Family. Recently my family has been driven from power by Marxist revolutionaries. I need your kind help to move my family's enormous stash of TWO HUNDRED MILLION mod points out of the country. In exchange for your help I am willing to offer to you ten percent of this sum, deposited into the comments of your choice. As a gesture of good faith on your part, please mod this comment up.

Re:Why don't the Nigerians just

get their money from all those secret accounts that I keep getting emailed about.

Well, we would, but you see, there are a lot of legal fees involved in that kind of transaction. It's actually easier just to transfer the money out of the country, to an American bank account, and then transfer it back. If you'd be so kind as to give me your bank account number, I could just send you the money, and then you could send it back to me. Obviously I'd be willing to compensate you quite well for your time, all I need is to borrow about $5,000 from you up front to help offset the legal fees, and then I'll be able to take care of everything and pay you $100,000 for your time. Let me know if I can count on your support!

(No, I'm not really Nigerian.)

Dollars $ Dollars

$20 million dollars in damages...

Tutorial:

Q: How do you pronounce "$20"
A: "Twenty dollars"

Q: How do you pronounce "$20 million"
A: "Twenty million dollars"

Q: How do you pronounce "$20 million dollars"
A: "Twenty million dollars dollars"

You're welcome.
 

Re:Question Mark

Tutorial:

Q: Should the word "Nazi" be capitalized?
A: Yes.

Q: Do you hold article comments to the same grammatical standards as the articles themselves?
A: No.

Q: What do you call someone who does the above for no reason other than to attract attention and cause disruption?
A: A troll.

Re:Question Mark

Tutorial

Q: Should tutorial be the new fad?
A: Yes.

Q: Does it seem weak and unimaginative?
A: Yes.

Q: Then why persist?
A: In the mere hopes that it offends at least one person.

Re:Question Mark

Tutorial

Q: Is "it offends at least one person" a single hope?
A: Yes.

Q: Should "hopes" therefore be "hope"?
A: Yes.

Q: ??
A: Profit!!

Re:Question Mark

Tutorial, continued further...

Q: Should you place a comma in the sentence "Tutorial, continued..."?
A: Yes.

Q: When using the dash as a separator for an unordered list, should you place a space character between the dash and the first character of the list item?
A: Yes.

Q: Should the sentence following a sentence ending in ellipsis be capitalized?
A: Yes.

Q: Can someone "trend towards perfectionist"?
A: No. One can either trend towards perfectionists or trend towards perfectionism, the latter presumably being your intended meaning.

Q: Should you place the period inside or outside quotation marks?
A: Inside.

Q: Are there any exceptions to the above rule?
A: No. Exceptions exist for exclamation or question marks (depending on whether the mark applies to the quote alone or to the whole sentence), but never for commas or periods.

Q: Are any of the above rules relevant to Slashdot comments?
A: No, as I stated previously. The objective of communication rules is to facilitate maximally convenient communication between parties, and the rules vary depending on the medium and circumstances. In the case of Slashdot comments, the time required to analyze and correct spelling, grammar, punctuation and stylistic errors is unjustifiably high compared to the meager benefit it provides to the readers. Slashdot articles themselves, which are more formal than comments, have a greater time period to be written and checked, and are read by more people, have a justifiably higher standard applied to them. Still, they will have a lower standard than a formal academic paper. Similarly, in cases where communication speed is much more important than rigorousness, such as instant messaging or online game chat, it is perfectly acceptable that the sentence "lol kthxbye" has a better cost-benefit ratio than the sentence "That was amusing; all right, thank-you, and good-bye." The very definition of a "Grammar Nazi" is not simply one who uses formal grammar, but one who expects its use in situations where the expectation is not justified.

expect anything different?

Nigeria, the land of scammers and con artists. no wonder thier country is in the state it's in.

Re:expect anything different?

Nigeria, the land of scammers and con artists.

The silver lining of this truth is that the fewer computers Nigerians have the better off the rest of the world is. It would have been difficult and politically incorrect to boycott Nigeria from the OLPC, with a litle luck they just might boycott themselves.

Re:expect anything different?

If you're concerned about all the cyberdamage being done around the world, the real truth is that you'd be far better off disconnecting from China, Russia and the United States.

For all you people that want to pick on Nigeria, not everyone that comes from there is a scammer or a crook. As it happens, my girlfriend is from there (emigrated to the U.S. about 25 years ago) and is a remarkable individual. I consider myself lucky to have her. As an American, I tend to get irritated at all the foreigners here on Slashdot that like to make uninformed generalizations about the United States and its people. Anyone who's ever read any of my posts along those lines knows that. Conversely, I figure it's only fair not to paint everyone in a given country with the same brush, even if they do it to us with monotonous regularity.

That said, I wouldn't advise answering any Nigerian emails that show up in your inbox.

Re:

You should work on your reading comprehension. Try again, and you'll discover that I was making the point that there are not inherent racial differences between (for example) Nigerians, Americans, and Mexicans, but that rather the perceived differences are

Re:expect anything different?

gee that's funny, I always thought scammers didn't need to be living in Nigeria or connected to Nigeria in any way to send those kind of emails, silly me.

Nobody said they did. The fact that the Nigerian 419 Scam originated and from and is still largely dominated by well-organized Nigerian gangs with the complicity of Nigerian government officials, however, makes the point perfectly valid.

Really, you ought to at least cursorily research subjects before commenting on them.

Re:

Nigeria, the land of scammers and con artists. no wonder thier country is in the state it's in.

I'm not sure why someone doesn't simply go down there with $50k and bribe a judge to find the plaintiffs guilty of some truly dispicable crime, and watch the problem go away on its own... It would be cheaper than paying actual lawyers and, if my underst

Re:

Let me tell you a little "third world" history. I used to live in Manaus, Amazon, Brazil (where a Free Tax Zone was, one day, promoted by the Military Goverment). That Free Tax Zone gived a lot of power to some goverment officials and, guess what, corrup

Cut to the chase

Just send them weapons.

Re:Cut to the chase

China is doing that a lot in Africa, most likely Nigeria included.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9557 [cfr.org]

Re:Thats just it

I've done some careful research on this, and I believe the Africans got to Africa before the Europeans.

Fuller version...

Guess what the Nigerian keyboard makers want from the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization trying to make the world a better place? $20 million dollars in 'damages,' and an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria.

...and someone to help them get the $20 million dollars out of the country. They are willing to give 25% to anyone who will.

OLPC defense fund

When I collect my $25 million from the Honorable Juju Majinki, who is holding these funds in trust, I plan to donate part of those funds to the OLPC defense fund.

It is about kickbacks

I guess OLPC didn't pay the kickback moneys in pricing the deal now the corrupt are howling foul. Goes to show us in the free world how well we are off when institutionalized corruption is so rampant.

Or is it the government wanting to keep people dumb and stupid so they don't revolt for a democracy?

Would be interesting to see who bribed who to deprive the children from knowledge. There could be one hell of a story in that.

Corruption is part of the culture of Africa

It's easy to forget that most of Africa's problems stem from the fact that the culture places very little value on human life.

You know all those "relief funds" that go to poor/starving/fucked African countries? Yeah, most of those funds end up in the hands of the corrupt government leaders and/or military, who are MORE than happy to let everybody starve if it means more cash for them.

The problems with Africa can't be solved with donations. They can only be solved with armed revolutions. Of course, the U.S. and most of the rest of the world is making too much money off of the exploitation of Africa to actually want to fix things.

Re:Corruption is part of the culture of Africa

The problems with Africa can't be solved with donations. They can only be solved with armed revolutions. Of course, the U.S. and most of the rest of the world is making too much money off of the exploitation of Africa to actually want to fix things.

So, 3.8 million deaths weren't enough [wikipedia.org]?

Re:

Not nearly. What's needed is leadership after the bastards in charge are against a wall. But first you have to take out the trash. Yeah, and the africans will probably have to move the borders around - the current ones are externally imposed. One more step

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I know that may people may find this shocking, but Africa is not a country! Really! It is over 50 countries, and almost as many cultures. And believe it or not, some of the countries are not completely fucked up! However, a lot are, and they make bette

Re:

Surely you are not serious. Revolutions in Africa just replace one bunch of assholes with another bunch of assholes.

Which is exactly why revolutions won't work. The whole system is fucked. There are only two things that will work and nether of them are pretty.

One is armed conquest. The UN sends in the troops an we take over everything south of the Sahara. We to

Does the third-world really need laptops?

If you do read the article, it's a complicated case (as legal cases always are), that essentially boils down to this: Nigeria's officials, including their judges and politicians, are still perceived as being hopelessly corrupt, and by all appearances this is nothing more than attempted legal extortion. The legal claims by which the lawsuit is proceeding is on shaky ground at best. Even if the claims are legitimate, it still is a sad day, when an organization like this is sued by the very people it's most likely to benefit.

Maybe they aren't ready for a mass introduction of technology - they certainly have shown a compunction for abuse so far. Nigeria is already synonymous with Internet-based moneymaking scams. Does the third world have other, more important priorities instead of laptops, such as basic infrastructure, and a stable and responsive democratic government (most of the world's poorest countries are still ruled by dictators). Complain if you will about the governments of first-world countries such as the US, but if so, you likely haven't seen the corruption of others up close. Visit Mexico for a fine example of what happens when a country with significant potential is rife with corruption from top to bottom. Corruption tends to poison and overshadow even the benefits of democracy and capitalism, as it tends to keep power concentrated in very few hands.

On the other hand, perhaps an opening of information can help to educate the next generation - to give them more options, and more information, more hope. Just as wireless technology is leapfrogging the old, expensive landline-based infrastucture in many countries, perhaps an infusion of technology can help jump-start an economic surge in places that need it most. I just hope they choose to use it wisely.

Re:Does the third-world really need laptops?

Ooops. Too late. That cycle started quite some time ago, and I don't think there's any stopping it at this point...

Our culture at one point had an answer to that:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

But now, quoting Thomas Jefferson is likely to get you put on a suspected terrorist no-fly list.

keyboard in dispute not used in production devices

It appears that the disputed keyboard layout was only used in the development devices and not in the production devices. By this there should be no injunction on the distribution and likely no/minimal payment for infringement.

From Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071203061340580#c652659 [groklaw.net]

----
If you examine the OLPC Wiki's edit history for the West African (Nigerian) keyboard you can see what Adé Oyegbola is on about. To save you trawling back and forth here it is in a nutshell. Note that where I write "create" I am referring to the Wiki entires - these dates may not correspond to the physical devices.

      1. 2006-08-07 OLPC buy KONYIN keyboards
      2. 2006-11-13 OLPC create Nigerian layout based on KONYIN layout
      3. 2006-11-13 OLPC Nigerian image updated; layout unchanged
      4. 2007-03-02 OLPC image updated to show Beta-3 model; layout unchanged (Original Image March 2nd)
      5. 2007-08-?? LANCORP sends OLPC Cease & Desist Notice
      6. 2007-08-20 OLPC B3 layout revised completely, no longer looks like KONYIN (Revised Image August 20th)
      7. 2007-08-21 OLPC replaces B3 with B4 Ng-MP-Alt layout (more dialect symbols) and new image.

So this boils down to prototype XOs that used the KONYIN layout. I'm not sure how many prototypes were made with the Nigerian keyboard (I'd guess not many more than the 300 used at Galadima primary school, Abuja) but the total quantities were B1: 875, B2: 2,500, B3: 100, B4: 2,000, C1: 300 (see Development Schedule.

Since August 2007 with the C1 (pre-production) the West African (Nigerian) layout has been as you see it on the current Wiki page.

So the crux is that LANCORP are upset over those beta prototypes but the production XOs (and all XOs made since August 2007) have not used the KONYIN layout.
--

Re:keyboard in dispute not used in production devi

I'm not a lawyer but if they sent them a cease and desist letter, and they stopped infringing then they don't have much of a case. The best they can hope for is to get all the infringing models destroyed.

Re:keyboard in dispute not used in production devi

From a RIAA lawyers perspective, this is just fine. Add a little immorality (deprived children), do some simple math (300 * $66,666 = $20,000,000) and voila!

Nigeria

I was born in Nigeria, and spent the first 7 months of my life there, so sadly I don't have any memories of the place. My mum and dad have regaled me with tales of corruption (everyone from the gardener to the police it seems) and it sounds like a horrible place in which to live and work. I have no desire to go back.

How do you spell SCO in Nigerian?

LANCOR.

Yes, I realize there are over 500 languages being used in Nigeria and their official language is English. I just hope the courts in Nigeria can grind a little faster than the courts in America.

IMO this ploy by LANCOR against OLPC is a carbon copy of the SCO scheme against Linux. I wonder if the company funding LANCOR is the same company that funded the SCO fiasco. [news.com]

Re:

No, but hey, at least consider what they're doing and don't be "that guy".

There is probably nothing of consequence here (legally), but the need to defend themselves will probably put a dent on how much more good the OLPC program can bring to children els

Re:No Reason to Pity

Ok, but when OLPC asked "Assuming you aren't saying you own the entire idea of a multi-language keyboard, which parts of your particular keyboard design are you even saying we stole from you?"

They didn't answer but they still want $20 million dollars.

Re:No Reason to Pity

I see a trend here?

- "Linux stole unix code!"
- "Oh really? Which lines, exactly?"
- "I'm not telling."

- "Linux infringes 235 of our patents"
- "That's likely, you patented the obvious. We'll see when IBM starts complaining about their patents you likely infringe upon. BTW, Which ones?"
- "I'm not telling."

- "OLPC steals our patented keyboard input method"
- "Oh really? Which ones exactly?"
- "I'm not telling."

I'm reconsidering the real cruelty of the good ol' times where justice was administered by the king, and if you looked like you were making him lose time on useless technicalities you were going to be hanged.

Re:

This is taking place in a Nigerian court.

A hanging (ie: corporate death penalty) may not be totally out of the question. If I recall correctly, LANCOR has to pay court fees if it turns out to be a waste of court time.

Re:No Reason to Pity

Putting a bunch of Nigerian-language characters onto a keyboard doesn't qualify as an "invention"; it's exactly what's been done for hundreds of other languages around the world since before Nigerian-language characters were in the Unicode standard even (which, I might point out, that same generous West put in after working hard to create those standards in the first place and then giving them to poor countries like Nigeria for free). Perhaps the West should demand royalties from this company for using its technologies like Unicode and keyboards in the first place, haha, right.

I'm afraid this is just how things go here in Africa, and as someone else pointed out, why it'll probably remain 3rd-world indefinitely. Try give a hand to Africa, and it will demand an arm, and then try kill you for not giving the entire arm. Mod me whatever, but I've lived here all my life and seen this kind of thing over and over, facts are just facts, I wouldn't expect someone who hasn't lived here to get it.

Re:No Reason to Pity

I haven't lived in Africa, but I have lived in under-developed nations a large portion of my life. To be honest, you hit the nail on the head, and it's not just limited to Africa. The problem with aid agencies is that they are just as corrupt, if not more, than the governments they are trying to protect the citizens from.

Aid agencies need to be a lot stricter on their staff members and have stiffer penalties for any transgressions - you know, like a bit of gaol time in a dingy cell rather than painting them as a Martyr like the "Chad Children Thieves".

Re:

Putting a bunch of Nigerian-language characters onto a keyboard doesn't qualify as an "invention"; it's exactly what's been done for hundreds of other languages around the world since before Nigerian-language characters were in the Unicode standard even (w

Re:

I don't know why you say this is a "3rd-world" problem. We in the US have crap like One-Click-Buy patents that are laughable (although it looks like it is finally getting overturned). Or, letting MS be the annoying monopoly it is and make every PC pay the

Re:

Here's a a problem for Negroponte: IP infringement.

Describe, in your own words, what IP has been infringed.

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LANCOR is claiming to have a patent on a keyboard that allows the user to type in Nigerian. How can you possibly call that an innovation, and how can you possibly accuse anyone of stealing that? Do you think that Nigerians should be required to pay LANCO

Re:Die OLPC, Die.

It's just a QWERTY keyboard with a second shift key and Nigerian letters painted in purple.

Not kidding.

Re:

It's just a QWERTY keyboard with a second shift key

Sounds shifty to me.

Seriously, though, don't most keyboards have two shift keys (and a caplocks key)?

Re:Don't do business there

Very racist, but oh so true.

Nope. Not racist at all.

"Don't deal with black people" is racist. "Don't deal with African Countries, unless they're white" is racist. "Don't deal with country X that has a history of corruption, and happens to be black" is no more racist than "don't go down Johnson street, there were fifty murders there last year."

Re:

Then it'd probably be unsafe for children.

LANCOR has no point

You are technically correct, but your point has nothing to do with this LANCOR situation, since their claim is specifically about illegal use of "their" keyboard layout - nowhere does their complaint say anything about being harmed by cheap laptop dumping, nor do they represent any group of people who might have such claim.

Anyway, there is a crucially important difference between this and other forms of dumping which are actually more wrong: This is basically PRIVATE charity, it's not e.g. the US government dumping cheap computers on the 3rd world to subsidise their own industry; rather, it's private individuals using private money.