No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: OLPC Hit By Patent Claims
from the but,-of-course dept
Always nice to see two unrelated topics that we discuss on Techdirt come together in a single story. A bunch of folks have been sending in the news that the One Laptop Per Child program has been hit with a patent infringement suit in Nigeria. The company claims that the OLPC folks "reverse engineered" its four shift keys on a keyboard, in order to better handle multiple languages. While we think the OLPC project has all sorts of problems, that doesn't mean we think highly of using the patent system to shut down a project that clearly was intended for the greater good, rather than for profit. It will be interesting to see the details of the case as they come out. By claiming that OLPC "reverse engineered" their product (and, honestly, do you really need to "reverse engineer" four shift keys?), it sounds like they're accusing the organization of willful infringement, which could be a lot costlier. Either way, nice to know that the fascination over patent litigation isn't avoiding charitable ventures either.
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I was one of the ones to send it in
But it's four. Still, that's not exactly particularly innovative. Sticking more buttons on is pretty basic, you know? It's like patenting the addition of more keys to a keyboard.
And yeah, it's also being filed in America in three months I think from the report. And they seem to be focusing on willful.
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Do they need to?
Oh, and I'm sure there are ways to reverse-engineer legally?
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WTF?!!
Point #2 why would you even need to buy a couple of keyboards or look at the driver? Or even look at the patent? You press some combination of keys in the right order and it returns a character. Or two characters. Wow. I think my kids could duplicate something like that using Scratch in a few minutes.
Point #3 the freaking ZX81 keyboard had something like this.. Each key had three or four functions depending on what else you pressed, and one of those functions was that a single keypress would type a whole two to five characters basic keyword.. That's about 25 years prior art if we can track down a still-working ZX81 somewhere in Nigeria.
Hey, wasn't Bill Gates snooping around in Nigeria recently? And all of a sudden that Mandriva deal got really messed up, and now this. Seems a bit fishy to me!
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Double Bucky, you're the one...
But that's not what this patent is about. It's specifically about the use of modification keys to assist in input of other languages.
(Again, depending on the specifics of the patent, the space cadet keyboard might qualifiy, since it had a "Greek" key.)
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Reverse Engineering
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Reqest Fir Irgent Biznis Relashon
Regards, Nigerian Dude
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Silly...
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Keyboard Patent
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OLPC Project
Get behind this effort and help the kids. But no we do not care for the kids. It is sad!
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Ha
i think the Prince of Nigeria is related to the company in nigeria
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If you dig a little, the holder claims that he met with the OLPC folks to try to license his keyboard to them - and instead of doing that, they stole his idea.
So - it is OK for many others to collect royalties on OLPCs but just not this company/guy?
Maybe the guy is making it up - and maybe he isn't. Maybe the patent is a total fraud and maybe it isn't. I don't think a little one paragraph line in this blog really justifies the didactic comments that most here have made. But that is the beauty of the Internet isn't it? We can all have strong opinions about things without knowing a single detail about them, right?
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