Let's talk about @what3words, whatfreewords, and how IP protection can effectively doom things. This is going to be a longish thread, and I may do a follow-up on stream Wed. https://twitter.com/zackwhittaker/status/1388248842743713802

At the start, I think it would be good to clarify the nature of the legal threat that W3W sent out. My read is that it is not targeted at the criticism of their product, but 'just' at anything that might make it easier to find whatfreewords. https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690?s=20

That limited threat is, of course, not necessarily going to save them from a well-deserved Streisanding. But if they're going to be Streisanding themselves, let's see if we can highlight the true nature of the problem: https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1388127296293281799?s=20

And that's simple: W3W is using IP law to lock up a potentially useful, if flawed, concept - and because of the way they have locked it up, it's unlikely (or at least far less likely) that anyone, including them, will reap the benefits in the long term.

Let's start with the concept, and how it works. (My apologies in advance for any small misunderstandings I may have.)

It's relatively simple: the world is divided into a huge number of small boxes. Each box is assigned a three word address.

These three-word addresses are designed to be easy to remember and hard to confuse. But they're also heavily tech-dependent. ///remind.grit.waddled is across the street from ///diary.quit.types. So you have to go through their database for quite a lot.

And, of course, they're subject to the errors of the information they put in - in the case of the examples I put in above, I can tell you that one of those is mapped to an incorrect street address.

But there's at least some potential utility here.

What3Words has done everything they can to ensure that they own their idea. If a form of IP could apply, they leverage it.

And they are ruthless in shutting down competition, especially open-source alternatives. They have to. Their business model depends on it.

They are established in a good location for doing that, too. If someone came to me with their idea, I'd probably tell them that they are better off basing out of the UK or EU than the USA. And that the UK is possibly a better option than the EU.

Their word list, for example, is at best marginally protectable by copyright in the USA. I think it could be argued that it's creative enough to clear Feist - but it would be arguable and probably a very close call.

The minimum creativity standard in the EU - "author's own intellectual creation" - may or may not work in their favor. There's a personality requirement there. But I think the odds are a bit better than in the USA, where Feist is still good law.

In the UK, copyright protects things that embody the skill, judgment, and labour of the author. The "sweat of the brow" that we rejected in Feist will support copyright there.

And Europe and the UK extend a separate form of protection to databases - one that we don't have here.

So W3W has, I think, a significantly better ability to lock up their idea being based where they are than if they were based here.

Which is essentially the problem.

Addresses aren't just a classic public good. They're a thing that really only works AS a public good. Addresses are a communications tool. They only work if both the sender and the receiver have access to them.

Which is REALLY hard to do if they're not free.

If I'm sitting at the little table outside my favourite bar in London, at //gown.costs.label, sipping a pint of Żywiec, and someone asks me where I am, it does me no good to tell them I'm at gown.costs.label unless they have a way of knowing where that is.

Not only that, but they also need to know where they are - if they're coming out of Holborn station, they need to know where that is (///dollar.onion.jars). And, of course, they need to know how to get from ///dollar.onion.jars to ///gown.costs.label.

(Left coming out of the station, left into Gate street, which doesn't really look like a street but trust me. Down gate to The Ship Tavern, where the street turns right. Turn left there into the narrow alley - trust me - and Bar Polski will be on the right in about 100 feet.)

Thing is, to do all that the W3W way, you've got to go through their servers a bunch of times, and if they're down, you're kind of screwed.

This isn't knowledge that is terribly useful locked up.

It might be useful and become widely adopted if it's open-source (although I think less arbitrary addresses would likely be more useful). But that doesn't work too good as a business model.

(Wikipedia had a similar problem; ask @jimmy_wales if you don't believe me.)

But, where Jimmy Wales was smart enough to recognize that the business he was trying to create was only going to work as something that was aggressively open access and open source and adapt accordingly, W3W is sticking to their proprietary model.

They can do that. They have that right.

But it's not - at least so far - hitting the level of adoption that I suspect they were hoping for. It's not rapidly becoming a global norm. Or even, I suspect, a thing more than a relatively small fraction of people have heard of.

And, of course, because they have aggressively locked down everything and are taking a hard line against any effort to develop an open-source version, that's not likely to change.

Ultimately, they are trying to monetize a thing that only really is likely to work if it's free to all - addresses and the related knowledge of how to get from place to place are just incredibly unlikely to work when all of the key knowledge is proprietary.

Unfortunately, we don't have an IP system that rewards the creation of a new variety of public good. If the people who exercised the (considerable) skill, judgment, and labour needed to invent w3w want to cash in on their invention, they have few alternatives.

And those alternatives are, for the most part, entirely inconsistent with the thing they invented reaching its true potential.

It's an unfortunate situation in many ways.

But that still doesn't make their approach smart, good, or likely to succeed.

/fin