Another similar service (that I like better) is what3words. Unfortunately that's patented/proprietary, so no one will ever use it.
Basically it splits the world into small squares, each defined by 3 common English words. Very easy to remember.
Basically it splits the world into small squares, each defined by 3 common English words. Very easy to remember.
Actually, that means there's a bunch of money behind it, bribing carmakers to include it in their nav systems, etc.
It's still shit, but it'll be ubiquitous shit.
* If you accidentally change the word order for a location, you could send a mailman to a wrong and faraway location:
- http://map.what3words.com/help.driver.lost is in Chicago
- http://map.what3words.com/driver.lost.help is near Grand Rapids
- cosmetic.takeover.fries is in Amsterdam
- cosmetic.takeover.fires is above the Pole Circle in Russia
- cosmetic.takeovers.fries is west of Shanghai
why do we need to?
Why can't it simply be this string = this place. that string = that place ? Why does there have to be metadata indicating relative positions of things? US address on the same street have relative metadata, but ones on different streets do not. They may be around the corner from each other or they may be across town. You don't know, and yet we get along just fine. I'd also point to "Massachusetts Ave." in Boston and its suburbs which has the same damn numbers like 4 times and thus 660 Mass ave. gives you NO clue where the thing is relative to 658 which may be next door and miles away and it may be east or west, or both. Somehow we've been able to get along just fine without relative metadata on different streets or even the same one. Why should it be a requirement here?
With what3words, "///ladders.chimp.drama" is exactly next to "///thick.candle.enacts" and "///nails.spit.blaring", but you can't tell. Also, you don't know whether there are other addressable points in between. It would have been nice if there was more method in this madness.
If not done more than a cursory reading of those claims, but I wonder if you could work around it by simply making some of the mappings non-unique?
I did not look at the dependent claims because generally if you infringe a dependent claim you necessarily also infringe the dependent claim upon which it depends. As the Federal Circuit noted [1]:
"It is axiomatic that dependent claims cannot be found infringed unless the claims from which they depend have been found to have been infringed."
However, a year later [2], that same court quoted that in another case, and then said:
"While this proposition is no doubt generally correct, it does not apply in the circumstances of this case"
The circumstances of that had something to do with the doctrine of equivalents being used to find infringement of the dependent claims, but the scope of the equivalents was wide enough to bring in prior art that would encompass the independent claim (but not the dependent claim), and so that prior art stopped infringement of the independent claim but not of the dependent claim--or something like that. I've not looked serious at patent law in a long time so this is getting into territory I'm now very fuzzy on.
My initial impression is that this would probably not apply if the alleged infringement of the what3words patent was a product that was pretty much the same as what3words except for not satisfying the uniqueness properties from that patent.
[1] Wahpeton Canvas Co., Inc. v. Frontier, Inc., 870 F.2d 1546, 1553 & n. 9, 10 USPQ2d 1201, 1208 & n. 9 (Fed. Cir. 1989)
[2] Wilson Sporting Goods Co., Plaintiff-appellee, v. David Geoffrey & Associates D/b/a Slazenger, and Dunlopslazenger Corporation Aka Dunlop Sportscorporation, Defendants-appellants, 904 F.2d 677 (Fed. Cir. 1990)
- convert a 2D value into a single value
- divide that value up into 3 values
- there’s a 1-1 database of values that map a value to a word
Pretty much everyone on this site could come up with that concept given 15 minutes to think about the problem.
How is this patentable?
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/09/24/podcast-episode-21...
Tell that to aramex, dominos, Mercedes and united nations