A Massachusetts company has sued the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation for patent infringement, saying that the project has stolen it’s own designs for a multilingual keyboard on the OLPC XO Laptop; which was recently released to the public in a buy 2 get on scheme, where the user purchases a laptop for themselves and pays for a laptop for a user in a third world country.
Lagos Analysis Corp, also known as Lancor, filed the lawsuit on Thursday, in the Federal High Court in Nigeria, where the company owns the patent for the four shift-key keyboard, said said Adé Oyegbola, Lancor’s CEO.
The OLPC foundation illegally reverse-engineered the companies patented keyboard, which, with it’s four shift-key layout, allows the computer to better handle multiple languages, said Oyegbola. Lancor wants the Nigerian court to issue ‘substantial damages’ and issue a permanent injunction against OLPC to prevent it from manufacturing and selling it’s XO laptop, which has been the center of a lot of focus recently, as it is the final product of the “$100 laptop project”.
http://www.gpearce.co.uk/news/interesting/olpc-foundation-sued.html