I still don't understand how this company managed to get a patent for what amounts to using coordinates to look up words in a table.
It's also not the first todo this, there is prior art.
For example this person was asking about what they would need to do to invalidate it because they built basically the same thing, but using 5 words before this company even had patents.
https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inve...
Around 11 years ago, there was a South African startup called Waytag [0] [1]. It was started by some business consultant guys, who I assumed didn't understand the lack of novelty in their idea (from a patent perspective).
Their idea was similar, minus the algorithm. You could assign names to places, and people would use their proprietary system to find them.
They filed for patents in various countries, US included.
Here's their European patent: [2], status withdrawn. The US equivalent is patent US20120246195A1. I can't find its history, nor a post on Patents Stackexchange, to detail the history.
Someone applied to have it invalidated, on the premise that there was existing prior art.
My reading of the Patents question, is that this person filed an opposition in the UK. Has anyone ever tried doing same in the US? Or has some legal time lapsed?
Patents can be challenged. You would need to file a lawsuit though if the filing challenge dates are past. Prospective patents are announced in a government gazette
OpenStreetMap seem to have missed a trick. The GB patent was thrown out for being obvious, and the report on the exam is public. They also suggested withdrawing the application due to the EU one being filed.
Couldn’t you get around this by just making it a trade secret and not publishing it? Your competitor can’t ask to see your source code (assuming it’s compiled). Patent trolls deserve whatever they have coming. It’s one thing if they have a novel idea but if they knowingly sit on a patent of a fundamental method that was given to them in error, they don’t deserve any consideration.
From TFA: “This is not a battle worth fighting,” he said in a tweet. Toponce told TechCrunch that he has complied with the demands, fearing legal repercussions if he didn’t.
Okay, but let's see what they wanted: "The letter also demands that he disclose to the law firm the identity of the person or people with whom he had shared a copy of the software, agree that he would not make any further copies of the software and to delete any copies of the software he had in his possession."
Umm, F-THAT!! I will not send you personal contact info of anyone for anything without a warrant/suponea for any of my clients/customers/users/friends. Anyone that would be willing to do that should have that tattooed across their foreheads so anyone in the future will know.
My guess is you have never found yourself in this kind of legal situation.
In my experience, as someone that was detained for the first time at the age of 14 by the secret service for counterfeiting, has multiple subsequent arrests, and despite all that actually became a lawyer myself, while a lawyer later in life was abducted and kidnapped at gun point managed to escape by jumping out of a moving car and tracked down the guy 24 hours later and delivered him to the police (or police to him) - so I feel I have some life experience - it’s the person screaming the loudest about what they would do in the shoes of others that is usually the least likely to actually do it.
Unless you can say what you have done in like circumstances you don’t know.
So before you go around championing marking people with tattoos in order to readily identify them, at least consider where in history that very concept comes from. My suggestion if you feel so strongly, is help, maybe by donating money for a legal fund, or at minimum show a little compassion and moral support, but don’t tell someone else what you would do in their shoes and how you’d punish them if they don’t show the same moral convictions you pretend to have without being put to the test.
> I will not send you personal contact info of anyone for anything without a warrant/suponea
Unless you're (a) swimming in money, (b) have some kind of strong (and free?) legal/financial support behind you to battle such a thing, (c) are not in the US, or (d) are so poor that you have nothing to lose anyway, this sounds like a rather incredible claim. Most people facing potentially massive lawsuits would probably cave.
@cybergibbons also discovered that whatever algorithm they use has the unfortunate property that points fairly close together only differ in whether one word is singular or plural.
For support to be sent to the wrong location in an emergency situation just because "fields" was misheard as "field" or vice versa is unconscionable.
What3Words has always confused me. It has a bunch of misleading encodings, it claims to be somehow innovative when there's prior art, and they are very heavy handed on the legal side of things.
And it isn't even like it's difficult to come up with. Here's my 5-minute implementation of something similar from a couple years ago: [0][1]
what3words is an app which, when installed, will provide 3 words which correspond to a location, but the location can only be decoded by someone else who has access to the what3words name resolution service or has the app installed.
They've raised $39* million dollars in funding and they're "helping improve businesses around the world, and paving the way for social and economic progress in developing nations" [1]. Because developing nations really want to use a 3rd party app with a 'proprietary naming convention' to help them map and develop their land.
I can't imagine how What3Words is actually useful. According to [1], 5 decimal places in Lat/Lon coordinates gets you 1.11 meter accuracy at the equator (more accurate than the 3m w3w claims). If you're in a densely populated area, your cell phone would provide the location in most circumstances. If you're really lost 100 meters, or 3 decimal places is likely all you need. That's twice as many words (three before the decimal, and three after). But I'm sure if you break it down into syllables, Lat/Lon coordinates will likely win or at least be enough every time.
Once you factor in the ambiguity of what words are being spoken, words you don't know how to pronounce, and language barriers, I can't imagine a use for W3W. To use an example from the article, "circle.goal.leaders" is six syllables and could easily be interpreted as "circle.go.leaders". Of course, if you count the dots or pauses, lat/lon wins pretty much every time. And even a lot of Americans can count to 10 in multiple languages.
You seem to be forgetting that lat/long is two numbers, not just one. "Seventy six point three five two comma minus one fifty three point nine oh one" is definitely harder to work with than "circle goal leaders". Especially as you don't need to say "dot".
(I do agree that the What3Words approach is flawed, both technically and commercially.)
As I understand it they're aggressively marketing and lobbying to become the standard mapping system in underdeveloped countries without a strong addressing system.
Once they've achieved this (either informally or by getting enshrined in the legal system) they can start squeezing local businesses and the government for access to their service. It's pure rent seeking.
As part of this strategy, it's in their interest to create an unnecessarily unintuitive service so you can't go anywhere without using their app. The three words provide absolutely zero geographic information about the location.
They're about as close to a truly evil company as I can think of. Luckily they seem to have had minimal success so far, as the revenue numbers are awful.
Think of the 3 words like a phone number. They could try to sell access to the only phone book that exists. Requires some kind of critical mass, but I've heard of worse business plans.
They could also probably sell novelty "phone numbers", like every professional sports team buys the equivalent of "boston red sox" for the location of their stadium.
No clue what their actual business model is, I'm just spitballing.
Copyright infringement aside, naming the project "WhatFreeWords" seems to teeter very close to trademark infringement. The legal term if I recall is "deceptively similar" which the OSS project arguably is.
Using 'Free' could also be a nod to the fact that there are a lot of very similar sounding words in the What3Words system [1].
The What3Words word list is 40,000 words long. It is important that words in this list cannot be confused, otherwise they may be communicated incorrectly. For example band/banned, bare/bear, beat/beet are easily confused.
A quick inspection of their word list finds the following words that sound very, very similar to one another:
With default-deny { scripts, cookies, fonts }, this is genuinely one of the friendliest webpages I've read this week. I don't know whether this outcome was an intended graceful-degradation behavior, or just an accident, but it's perfect.
All I get is (compressed, transferred network bytes): 68 kB of HTML, in two files; 63 kB of CSS, in one file; two webp images totaling 628 kB; and two small favicons (one of which downloads twice due to a misconfiguration, which wasted an extra 3.33 kB but whatever). It's exactly what I want from an internet news article: it's perfect! It loads instantly, and has a flawlessly readable, distraction-free formatting. It's like the apotheosis of newsprint, elevated to the shimmering silicon screen.
I read there's an obnoxious javascript page redirect in one of the scripts. When you block 1st + 3rd party scripts both, most of that class of annoyance goes away. IMHO it's a very reasonable default for many sites.
Thank you so very much, @gorhill (uMatrix / uBlock Origin). You've saved the internet in my eyes.
Here is crazy idea: take the standard long/lat system and trim it down to numbers that can point to any 20m2 square in the world. Now translate each number to two words.
Now you have a much simpler 4-word system that can be translated back to the standard system. Furthermore, since you use 4 identifiers instead of 3 you may be able to exclude many similar sounding words.
If someone made a version while avoiding the specific implementation would they be alright? I think that where the author messed up is by reproducing the algorithm altogether. The original article highlighted deficiencies in the implementation. Maybe it would have been better to fix those issues with a better, unrelated algorithm and release that for free.
Since a lot of people criticize their design, and obviously we all hate their business/legal practices, can we all just develop an alternative that is not patent-encumbered, give it a permissible license, and release it? That would put a knot in W3W's britches.
Aside: Is there a way to crowd-source [non-monetary] efforts like this? I don't want to get paid for it, I just want to put it out there for free and get some help.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
What3Words – The Algorithm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046 - May 2021 (148 comments)
[+] [-] anfilt|4 years ago|reply
It's also not the first todo this, there is prior art. For example this person was asking about what they would need to do to invalidate it because they built basically the same thing, but using 5 words before this company even had patents. https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inve...
Also on the OpenStreet Wiki, the EU seems to have doubts on the patents Validity. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words#Patent_Validi...
[+] [-] dleslie|4 years ago|reply
It's designed this way to encourage Americans to patent everything and anything, in order to dominate the intellectual property market.
[+] [-] nevi-me|4 years ago|reply
Their idea was similar, minus the algorithm. You could assign names to places, and people would use their proprietary system to find them.
They filed for patents in various countries, US included.
Here's their European patent: [2], status withdrawn. The US equivalent is patent US20120246195A1. I can't find its history, nor a post on Patents Stackexchange, to detail the history.
Someone applied to have it invalidated, on the premise that there was existing prior art.
My reading of the Patents question, is that this person filed an opposition in the UK. Has anyone ever tried doing same in the US? Or has some legal time lapsed?
[0] https://ventureburn.com/2010/06/waytag-changing-the-way-we-u...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10961677
[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2488969A1/en
[+] [-] oytis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killingtime74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ealexhudson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suifbwish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
Okay, but let's see what they wanted: "The letter also demands that he disclose to the law firm the identity of the person or people with whom he had shared a copy of the software, agree that he would not make any further copies of the software and to delete any copies of the software he had in his possession."
Umm, F-THAT!! I will not send you personal contact info of anyone for anything without a warrant/suponea for any of my clients/customers/users/friends. Anyone that would be willing to do that should have that tattooed across their foreheads so anyone in the future will know.
[+] [-] throwaway_kufu|4 years ago|reply
In my experience, as someone that was detained for the first time at the age of 14 by the secret service for counterfeiting, has multiple subsequent arrests, and despite all that actually became a lawyer myself, while a lawyer later in life was abducted and kidnapped at gun point managed to escape by jumping out of a moving car and tracked down the guy 24 hours later and delivered him to the police (or police to him) - so I feel I have some life experience - it’s the person screaming the loudest about what they would do in the shoes of others that is usually the least likely to actually do it.
Unless you can say what you have done in like circumstances you don’t know.
So before you go around championing marking people with tattoos in order to readily identify them, at least consider where in history that very concept comes from. My suggestion if you feel so strongly, is help, maybe by donating money for a legal fund, or at minimum show a little compassion and moral support, but don’t tell someone else what you would do in their shoes and how you’d punish them if they don’t show the same moral convictions you pretend to have without being put to the test.
[+] [-] dataflow|4 years ago|reply
Unless you're (a) swimming in money, (b) have some kind of strong (and free?) legal/financial support behind you to battle such a thing, (c) are not in the US, or (d) are so poor that you have nothing to lose anyway, this sounds like a rather incredible claim. Most people facing potentially massive lawsuits would probably cave.
[+] [-] gadf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfaure|4 years ago|reply
For support to be sent to the wrong location in an emergency situation just because "fields" was misheard as "field" or vice versa is unconscionable.
https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1388844414450155521
The company simply denied that the analysis was correct.
[+] [-] shakna|4 years ago|reply
And it isn't even like it's difficult to come up with. Here's my 5-minute implementation of something similar from a couple years ago: [0][1]
Which encodes to 10cm, and not just a few meters.
[0] https://j6map.netlify.app/
[1] https://git.sr.ht/~shakna/j6
[+] [-] mbirth|4 years ago|reply
And this in various languages (all incompatible to each other, obviously).
[+] [-] info_free|4 years ago|reply
(Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has it manually excluded from their index, but this site is still fine.)
[+] [-] info_free|4 years ago|reply
https://cryptome.org/2021/04/WhatFreeWords-Javascript-Librar...
https://cryptome.org/2021/04/whatfreewords-py.tar.gz
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] propogandist|4 years ago|reply
They've raised $39* million dollars in funding and they're "helping improve businesses around the world, and paving the way for social and economic progress in developing nations" [1]. Because developing nations really want to use a 3rd party app with a 'proprietary naming convention' to help them map and develop their land.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/what3words
[+] [-] gmiller123456|4 years ago|reply
Once you factor in the ambiguity of what words are being spoken, words you don't know how to pronounce, and language barriers, I can't imagine a use for W3W. To use an example from the article, "circle.goal.leaders" is six syllables and could easily be interpreted as "circle.go.leaders". Of course, if you count the dots or pauses, lat/lon wins pretty much every time. And even a lot of Americans can count to 10 in multiple languages.
[1] http://wiki.gis.com/wiki/index.php/Decimal_degrees
[+] [-] ghusbands|4 years ago|reply
(I do agree that the What3Words approach is flawed, both technically and commercially.)
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|4 years ago|reply
https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/
[+] [-] cush|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrooched_moose|4 years ago|reply
Once they've achieved this (either informally or by getting enshrined in the legal system) they can start squeezing local businesses and the government for access to their service. It's pure rent seeking.
As part of this strategy, it's in their interest to create an unnecessarily unintuitive service so you can't go anywhere without using their app. The three words provide absolutely zero geographic information about the location.
They're about as close to a truly evil company as I can think of. Luckily they seem to have had minimal success so far, as the revenue numbers are awful.
[+] [-] paulv|4 years ago|reply
They could also probably sell novelty "phone numbers", like every professional sports team buys the equivalent of "boston red sox" for the location of their stadium.
No clue what their actual business model is, I'm just spitballing.
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robgibbons|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurfm|4 years ago|reply
The What3Words word list is 40,000 words long. It is important that words in this list cannot be confused, otherwise they may be communicated incorrectly. For example band/banned, bare/bear, beat/beet are easily confused.
A quick inspection of their word list finds the following words that sound very, very similar to one another:
[1] https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...[+] [-] gmiller123456|4 years ago|reply
https://www.bitlaw.com/guidance/trademark/dealing-with-a-con...
[+] [-] practicalpants|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riffic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _rkz1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] can16358p|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wackget|4 years ago|reply
Happily, you can read the article (without ads) via https://www.printfriendly.com
[+] [-] perihelions|4 years ago|reply
All I get is (compressed, transferred network bytes): 68 kB of HTML, in two files; 63 kB of CSS, in one file; two webp images totaling 628 kB; and two small favicons (one of which downloads twice due to a misconfiguration, which wasted an extra 3.33 kB but whatever). It's exactly what I want from an internet news article: it's perfect! It loads instantly, and has a flawlessly readable, distraction-free formatting. It's like the apotheosis of newsprint, elevated to the shimmering silicon screen.
I read there's an obnoxious javascript page redirect in one of the scripts. When you block 1st + 3rd party scripts both, most of that class of annoyance goes away. IMHO it's a very reasonable default for many sites.
Thank you so very much, @gorhill (uMatrix / uBlock Origin). You've saved the internet in my eyes.
[+] [-] dave5104|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 4mitkumar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llacb47|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nyolfen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ponytech|4 years ago|reply
This is based on Python code I found on a previous post about What3Words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21196402
[+] [-] zibzab|4 years ago|reply
Here is crazy idea: take the standard long/lat system and trim it down to numbers that can point to any 20m2 square in the world. Now translate each number to two words.
Now you have a much simpler 4-word system that can be translated back to the standard system. Furthermore, since you use 4 identifiers instead of 3 you may be able to exclude many similar sounding words.
Now, is this covered by their patent?
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|4 years ago|reply
Updated: They have an active US patent. Why didn't they try gunning him down with this instead of the IP letter?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9883333B2/en
[+] [-] frankus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batch12|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sturmeh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sturmeh|4 years ago|reply
If he called it anything else they would never have noticed or cared.
They risk drawing attention to their non-existent competition by raising this legal action if they don't have a "sure" chance of winning.
[+] [-] sixhobbits|4 years ago|reply
https://justpaste.it/39hat
[+] [-] throwaway823882|4 years ago|reply
Aside: Is there a way to crowd-source [non-monetary] efforts like this? I don't want to get paid for it, I just want to put it out there for free and get some help.