OLPC Sued by Lancor for Patent Infringement

Lagos Analysis Corporation, also known as Lancor, filed the lawsuit in the Federal High Court alleging that OPLC "one Laptop Per Child" stole its designs for a multilingual keyboard which has four shift-keys.

OLPC is accused of illegally using reverse-engineering for the company's patented keyboard which has a four-shift key setup that allows computers to better handle multiple languages.

Lancor specially wants the Nigerian court to award substantial damages and issue a permanent injunction to prevent OLPC from manufacturing and selling its XO laptop.

OLPC denied the formal allegations of the lawsuit saying: "OLPC has the utmost respect for the rights of intellectual property owners," said Robert Fadel, OLPC director of finance and operations. "To OLPC's knowledge, all 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."

Lancor developed "Shift2" technology which is used to make Multilingual Keyboards like accent, tildes, umlauts and other symbols for different languages in Nigeria.

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Despite the allegations of patent infringement, Lancor admitted that OLPC purchased two multilingual keyboards, alleging that it later used them to reverse-engineer the source codes for use in OLPC's XO laptops.

OLPC is a nonprofit organization founded by Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts with the goal of donating laptops to children in developing nations.

The nonprofit organization is supported by U.S. and Canada residents who donate $400 and get one laptop for themselves while at the same time sending a second laptop to a child in developing nations like Africa.

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