One Laptop Foundation Sued Over Keyboard Design

Wade Roush11/28/07

A Nigerian businessman says the keyboard of the XO Laptop, produced by the Cambridge-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation, is suspiciously similar to a multilingual keyboard patented by his company, technology writer Hiawatha Bray is reporting today in the Boston Globe. Ade Oyegbola, founder and CEO of Natick, MA-based Lagos Analysis Corp., also called Lancor, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the foundation in Nigeria and plans to sue in U.S. courts as well. Foundation officials wouldn’t comment on the suit, but told Bray that they believed that “all of the intellectual property used in the XO Laptop is either owned by OLPC or properly licensed.”

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.