The One Laptop Per Child foundation has been reportedly sued over a keyboard design that allegedly infringes upon a Nigerian patent. According to the Boston Globe, Ade Oyegbola, founder and CEO of Lagos Analysis Corp., or Lancor, has sued OLPC in Nigeria for infringing upon a design, as well as allegedly illegally reverse-engineered the software codes used to power it. Keyboard comparisons after the jump.

Nigeria is one of several countries testing the OLPC, which, according to a lengthy Wall Street Journal article on the subject, is being stomped by the Intel/Microsoft sponsored Classmate PC in the developing world.

So if Oyegbola is an opportunist, he's going after the wrong company. (I'm sure some will point out that Nigeria is often the source of email scams. However, I think that's clearly an unfair characterization in this case.)

According to a press release, Lancor is challenging the OLPC on "LANCOR's Nigeria Registered Design Patent # RD8489 and illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes". Like others, I can't seem to find an electronic copy of the RD8489 patent, and I have no idea of the restrictions or permissions as applied to Nigerian patent law.

The OLPC said they hadn't seen the suit.

"One Laptop per Child, a non-profit educational organization, has heard that Lagos Analysis Corp. (LANCOR) has sued OLPC in Nigeria, but OLPC has not seen any legal papers related to the alleged suit as of this time," said Robert Fadel, the OLPC Foundation's director of finance and operations, in a statement. "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. Until we have a copy of the claim and have had time to review it, we will not be commenting further on the matter."

However, at least on the design of the Lancor keyboard below (the OLPC keyboard is at the top of the page), there seem to be some differences:

Because of the varied characters in the Nigerian language, the "Ng" (Lancor) or "alt gr" (OLPC) key is apparently used to type special characters. To create a special character, a user needs to strike the letter, then the "shift" key, and then the "Ng" or "alt gr" key. (Western keyboards use different method; in word processors like Microsoft Word, typing "CTRL-'" (CTRL-apostrophe) and then an "e" produces an "é". Alternatively, one can type ALT-0233 in some applications.)

From a layout standpoint, it's clear that the two keyboards are different. However, there is definitely a use of an additional function key. Is this key necessary? It' seems to be. In this list of OLPC Nigerian keyboard codes, the ALT function is not used for characters like the "£" character used for pounds sterling. Instead, the "alt gr" key is used, which functions as a shortcut to certain commonly-used special symbols.

I'm assuming that Oyegbola is referring to the OLPC link above when he claims that the OLPC group reverse-engineered the code. Again, how difficult this is, and whether such codes is obvious, will have to be hashed out in court.

An interesting comment at OLPC News' discussion of the issue notes this difference, however: "The KONYIN claims its uniqueness is in delivering TWO key-scan codes (Unicode) to the PC driver. As far as I know XO uses the standard XKB mechanisms and a regular SINGLE key-scan code from the keyboard."

It's also worth noting that in the U.S., reverse-engineering is legal, if it can be proven that the action was taken independently, and did not take from the original source code. I have no idea what Nigerian case law says on the matter, however, as the suit was filed there.

Additional reporting by Chloe Albanesius.