Comments on: Adding insult to injury: One Laptop Per Child sued for patent infringement

LANCOR wants to sue organizations with no money to pay them. Smart.

[Arbalest05]

So OLPC will pull out of Nigeria. Nigerian patents are not valid in any other country. The OLPC people will say good bye to Nigeria. Lancor may win a summary judgment but no fine need ever be paid.

[mesmorino]

Nigerian patents are not valid in any other country? That's a dumb statement, no offence intended. It's like saying, American patents are not valid in any other country, which means i could buy a copy of microsoft windows vista in new york, take it to australia and reverse engineer it all i wanted. Hell, if that statement were true, i could just take it across the border to either canada or mexico

[Molticappelli]

Matt, you write "Note to LANCOR: OLPC doesn't have any money."

I haven't checked myself, but if we believe the reporting work done by the Wall Street Journal, they do, actually.

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119586754115002717.html> states " Robert Fadel, its director of finance and operations, says the nonprofit has enough funding to last years. ... As of September, it had $8.7 million in cash on hand, an internal document indicates."

So maybe LANCOR did this little research before filing suit?

[Matt Asay]

I meant "real money." If I'm going through the bother of filing a patent suit (which costs, on average, $2-5 million to litigate) I better expect a much bigger return on that investment. $8.7 million isn't worth it.

[Penguinisto]

Let's see... Microsoft gets caught trying to bribe a Nigerian company to replace gov't-purchased Linux laptops with Windows, and suddenly this little puppet company pops up and screams about patent violations?

How much does anyone want to be that there's a bit of MSFT's money that's getting fed into this one, a'la SCO?

/P

[X-C3PO]

This only a misleading blog article.
If you DO have much spare time to care about the OLPC relative, please focus on how many poor kids can get it. And does the OLPC really help the poor kids in learning.

[Matt Asay]

I think it's highly relevant to OLPC's ability to serve developing nations if it's mired in legal controversy or not. Sorry we disagree on that.

[cybervigilante]

Typical - try to do good and swindling scumbags attack you. Nigeria is one rotten country. I get stupip Nigerian scams in my email every day, and their government aids and abets the swindlers. Of course they'll screw their own kids so some rotten crook can try to extort money from a good charity.

[komrad7800]

Thanks for this article. Really helpful.
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