Nigerians sue OLPC
NICHOLAS Negroponte has received a letter from a Nigerian outfit who claims his One Laptop Per Child nicked its multilingual keyboard technology.
Lagos Analysis solicitor Ade Adedeji claims that Negroponte borrowed two multilingual keyboards keyboards the company and reverse engineered the driver source codes so that they could work on OLPC machines.
It seems that Negroponte needs to send his bank details to Lagos Analysis so that he can pay for violating the company's patents.
While requests for cash are not uncommon from Nigeria it seems that Lagos Analysis is a United States-based Nigerian-owned company.
The patent infringement lawsuit was filed on November 22nd, 2007 as "a result of OLPC's willful infringement of LANCOR's Nigeria Registered Design Patent # RD8489 and illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes for use in the XO Laptops".
The Nigerian Press release can be found here. He probably wasn't expecting this.
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I thought reverse engineering was allowed if you kept to some rules, isn't that how MS started out? (I'm serious)
AMD certainly started out in the x86 market by reverse engineering Intel chips
"Please send bank account details" Got to love how people slide these ignorant comments when there is a tech story with ties to Nigeria. The scam was started 500 years ago in Spain. Spanish Captains would send leter to British Nobility asking for money with a promiss of getting tons more once they got back to Europe. Pick on the poor people of this planet cause they follow in your footsteps.
Not sure on the answer to that...fully as far as i know it fully depends on the individual companies licensing agreement... and patents (for US companies) if the idea is patented no reverse engineering is allowed. nothing of the same idea is allowed. in the copyright/usage terms ( EULA) of the driver there would have to be a clause stating that the use of the driver may not involve reverse engeneering.... am I the only one who reads the EULA before I install stuff or has someone else noticed that? If they used the driver in violation of its agreed usage rights...then they can get sued. If its not in there like.. most GPL allows for modification and reverse engineering (so long as it gets back to the public for free) hope that helps...thats all I got (anyone feel free to correct on anything incorrect)
Hey curious mkii ... AMD was licensed by Intel to produce chips in the 386 days because Intel didn't have the capacity to produce enough chips for the market... get your facts straight. And yes MS got aways with outright stealing Stacker's drive compression technology and used the "We didn't have the code so how could we infringe upon the code if we created it from scratch" kinda strange how MS made sure that soon after the idea alone can't be copied nevermind the code. Yeah this was before most "Techies" were even a glimmer in the eyes of their parents. But it is pathetic that someone is trying to claim infringement when this is for kids damn it. What ever this guy has no morals.