The ‘$100’ laptop tussle

A potential $20 million problem for the group behind the ‘$100 laptop’ is not going away easily.

Ade Oyegbola, an inventor who claims that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) non-profit stole his designs for a Nigerian keyboard, recently won a round in a Lagos court. This week he is pressing his case in a U.S. court.

The dispute began last year. One Laptop Per Child, spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Nicholas Negroponte, was sued by Mr. Oyegbola’s company, Lagos Analysis Corp., known as Lancor.

Nigerian dialects require punctuation marks not found on standard English keyboards, so Lancor developed a keyboard that uses four shift keys to produce the symbols. Mr. Oyegbola claims that OLPC bought two of Lancor’s keyboards in 2006, then copied the design for its own models intended for sale in Nigeria.

“It was obvious to anybody who looked at it.”

Lancor filed a patent lawsuit seeking $20 million in damages in Nigeria, and last month a court there rejected OLPC’s bid to dismiss the case.