OLPC, Sabotaged Again in Nigeria

LANCOR, a Nigerian division of Lagos Analysis Corporation, filled a patent infringement lawsuit against Nicholas Negroponte's initiative, One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Filled on November 22nd, the lawsuit addresses a willful infringement of LANCOR's Nigeria Registered Design Patent #RD8489, as well as "illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes for use in the XO Laptops".

LANCOR is a technology solutions provider that re-engineers both hardware and software solutions for product design. The company has already claimed substantial damages and, if the sentence is favorable, Negroponte will be prohibited to manufacture, sell, distribute or offer for sale the XO Laptop that incorporates the RD8489 keyboard driver source codes.

The lawsuit is funded on the premises that OLPC purchased two KONYIN Multilingual Keyboard models (KONYIN Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard and KONYIN United States Multilingual Keyboard) and performed illegal operations of reverse-engineering on the keyboard software. LANCOR's technology, named Shift2, uses four Shift keys to render accents, diacritics and symbol marks during a normal typing session. The technology has been implemented in a new class of region specific based keyboards called KONYIN Multilingual Keyboards.

"LANCOR treats its intellectual property as one of the Company's most important resources," said Ad� G. Oyegbola, chief executive officer of LANCOR. "This patent infringement lawsuit is another step in LANCOR's continued protection of its intellectual property. LANCOR will continue to take aggressive steps to protect its intellectual property around the world. LANCOR is also in the process of filing a similar lawsuit against OLPC in a United States Federal Court," Oyegbola, added.

This is the second attempt, and the most serious, in preventing Negroponte's initiative to take over the Nigerian market with the OLPC program. Apart from the Microsoft-Intel alliance meant to directly compete with Negroponte's XO laptops in Nigeria, the LANCOR lawsuit can put an end to the OLPC charity initiative worldwide.