Intellectual Property Rights and the OLPC laptop

Introduction

This page is about two aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the OLPC laptop.

• Firstly, the Intellectual Property Rights of the OLPC laptop, that is, the intellectual property rights which have been produced during the development work and which could be exploited commercially: for example by selling licenses of technology so that money can be raised for funding laptops for more children.

• Secondly, there are the Intellectual Property Rights owned by other companies and by individuals and how those Intellectual Property Rights affect the possibility of the use of the items they cover being used in the OLPC project.

The Intellectual Property Rights owned by other companies and by individuals

'OLPC-Approved', set out key points that need to be adhered to in terms of Hardware and software content by any third party manufacturer who is wishing to produce their own 'version' of the OLPC Laptop, some kind of approval sticker that if the laptop meets the set criteria then it can be classed as OLPC approved, or to coin a phrase 'has OLPC inside'.

Then next to or in place of the Intel and Windows stickers we see on computers they would be approved for sale under the OLPC family. This could be used for raising extra funding and for speeding up distibution of the laptops to countries.

Some offers of free licences of technology have been politely declined by the OLPC management as the technology is not open source.

See also: Licenses