One Laptop Per Child? Patent Infringement Lawsuit Might Slow Things Down
It looks like the One Laptop Per Child scheme has hit another roadblock - a patent infringement lawsuit.
Founder Nicholas Negroponte first came up with the idea of creating a cheap, easy-to-operate laptop computer, with the hugely exciting intention of making them cheap enough that even third world countries could afford to buy one for all their children.
It was dubbed the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and each portable computer was supposed to cost only $100. The price is still higher than that ($188 at the present), but the organization still hopes the price can be reduced.
Mass production of the machines began in November, and the government of Peru recently signed on to buy 260,000 of the machines for the country’s kids. One of Negroponte’s friends from Mexico, billionaire Carlos Slim, has also purchased 50,000 laptops to give to children in that country.
However, orders have come in much more slowly than the organization hoped. In many developing countries, paying for adequate health care and other necessary services must come first. Affluent Americans are being asked to help out by purchasing two of the machines for 400 bucks. They keep one, and the other goes to a child in a developing country. So far, this scheme has brought in orders for an additional 190,000 laptops.
Recently, however, the OLPC organization and it’s founder Nicholas Negroponte learned they are being sued for patent infringement.
The One Laptop Per Child foundation is being sued over its keyboard design by the Nigerian-owned, Massachusetts-based firm, Lagos Analysis Corp.
Lagos claims the non-profit organization illegally reverse-engineered their software drivers to make the OLPC keypad more accent mark friendly to foreign fingers.
The suit was filed in Nigeria, and the company plans to press further lawsuits in countries where the OLPC laptop is being sold.
The company states that its Konyin Multilingual Keyboard features four shift keys and a software driver specialized to more easily reproduce the uncommon accent marks found in Nigerian languages and dialects. Such diacritic ticks can be unwieldy in traditional keyboards, but are essential for the written language to be understood.
The company claims that Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who founded the OLPC foundation, purchased two of the company’s keyboards in 2006 and used them to reverse-engineer its keyboard technology.
The outcome will be interesting - more to follow, I’m sure.
Information for this article came from allafrica.com