A company suing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Association for patent infringement has asked for US$20 million to settle claims that the nonprofit had copied its keyboard.
Lagos Analysis Corp., or Lancor, is still trying to settle after filing the patent lawsuit in Federal High Court, Lagos Judicial Division in Nigeria, said Adé Oyegbola, Lancor’s CEO. Lancor, now based in Natick, Massachusetts, has offices in Nigeria and owns a Nigerian patent for a four-shift keyboard, allowing computers to better handle multiple languages, Oyegbola said.
Oyegbola on Wednesday confirmed information published on the Groklaw blog saying that in August his company had asked OLPC for US$20 million. That figure was based on OLPC information on potential distribution in Nigeria, Oyegbola said. Nigeria, in July 2006, placed an order for 1 million of the laptops, but the Nigerian government is now reviewing that decision.
Lancor’s Konyin Multilingual Keyboards sell for $19.95, meaning 1 million of them would be worth approximately $20 million. Lancor in December obtained a temporary injunction against OLPC distributing its laptop in the country. Lancor, in its lawsuit, accuses OLPC of illegal reverse engineering its multilingual keyboard.
But OLPC had not yet begun selling its laptop at the time of the demand, OLPC’s lawyer wrote in a letter published on Groklaw. “I feel obliged to note that, given the fact that OLPC has sold no multilingual keyboards, and that, according to Lancor’s Web site, its multilingual keyboard sells for US$19.95, your demand for US$20 million is not well founded,” lawyer Bruce Parker of the Foley Hoag law firm wrote.
Groklaw’s Pamela Jones, a frequent critic of patent lawsuits against open-source projects, called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”
“In short, they apparently jumped the gun, sending the dunning letter before OLPC had even shipped anything, not to mention that OLPC is a charity, not a business, and asking for money in a sum that doesn’t match reality,” she wrote.
A OLPC spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for a comment.