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Comment by noname120 | Hacker News Reader

What3words is patented[1]. If you compare the explanation of their free implementation[2] with the claims section of the patent, it seems very possible that it breaches the patent. In particular, the equations that are described in claim number 7 of the patent are exactly the same as in their explanations.

I'm not a lawyer so I can't talk about whether it can be enforced in practice. But still, the fact that this open-source implementation doesn't reference the patent anywhere suggests that they didn't consider the legal implications properly.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2014170646A1/fr?oq=WO%2f...

[2] https://whatfreewords.org/about.html

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IANAL, and may be wrong about how US patent law works but AIUI:

- A patent isn't infringed unless an independent claim is infringed

- Claim #7 (the one with the equations) is a dependent claim (dependent on claim #1, which is independent)

The key questions seem to be:

- whether claim #1 is being infringed, and

- whether the patent is valid

This is exactly correct. The point about the formulas was meant as an illustrative example about the fact that the patent might well apply rather than an argumentative one.

It's a good choice of example... of why it might be invalid due to Alice.

It's open source. Good luck enforcing patent claims against something that can be copied endlessly for free. Ask how that turned out against ffmpeg.

Eh, if they pull all apps which use that library from apple's and google's app stores, that would be enough to make it useless.

Codec IP owners usually grant royalty-free rights to software video players.

They make money licensing IP to hardware manufacturers.

MPEG-LA does not. https://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/ is their license scheme - while they allow a certain threshold below which cutoff isn't required, there's a lot of companies (such as Blizzard Entertainment!) whose primary distributed product is solely for video playback. H.264 requires a license for personal, at-home playback of encoded files. You have such a license if you have a Windows OS, an Apple OS, if you're using Chrome, or if you use a set-top box, or other "single-use" device which can play back H.264. You do not have such a license on linux with mplayer.

The FAQ strongly hints that they know there'll be some sort of legal blowback:

"Before WhatFreeWords existed, another group had released an open-source implementation of What3Words and published it on GitHub, and GitHub removed the repository after receiving a DMCA takedown notice from the What3Words company. It is likely that similar action would be taken against a WhatFreeWords repository on GitHub."

and:

"We prefer to remain anonymous. The What3Words company has shown that they will attempt to cause problems for people distributing open-source implementations of the What3Words geocoding system, so it is easier if we are anonymous."

Turns out that in order to evade DMCA action, they needed to do more than not being on github. As of yesterday I think..

"WhatFreeWords is currently unavailable due to DMCA action from the What3Words company"

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