Sometimes even the best intentions can’t avoid patent troubles: Nigerian-owned Lagos Analysis Corporation (a.k.a. LANCOR) has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the One Laptop Per Child project and its head Nicholas Negroponte over the multilingual keyboard design used in the low-cost OLPC XO notebook intended to benefit educational systems in developing nations. The suit accuses the OLPC project of willfully infringing on LANCOR’s design patent for multilingual keyboards, and reverse-engineering the company’s software drivers. The initial suit has been filed in Nigeria, and say it plans to bring a similar lawsuit in a U.S. federal court.
