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What3words Is A Clever Way Of Communicating Position Very Simply, But Do We Really Want To Create A Monopoly For Location Look-ups?

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The BBC News site has one of those heart-warming stories that crop up periodically, about how clever new technology averted a potentially dangerous situation. In this case, it describes how a group of people lost in a forest in England were located by rescue services. The happy ending was thanks to the use of the What3words (W3W) app they managed to download following a suggestion from the police when they phoned for help. W3W's creators have divided the world up into 57 trillion virtual squares, each measuring 3m by 3m (10ft by 10ft), and then assigned each of those squares a unique "address" formed by three randomly-assigned words, such as "mile.crazy.shade". The idea is that it's easier to communicate three words generated by the What3words app from your position, than to read out your exact GPS longitude and latitude as a string of numbers. It's certainly a clever approach, but there are number of problems, many of which were discussed in a fascinating post by Terence Eden from earlier this year. The most serious one is that the system is not open:

The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!It is the antithesis of open.
Another issue is the fact that the physical locations of addresses are changing in some parts of the world:
Perhaps you think this is an edge case? It isn't. Australia is drifting so fast that GPS can't keep up.How does W3W deal with this? Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.
Each language has its own list of words, and there's no simple way to convert between them for a given location. Moreover, there is no continuity in the naming between adjacent squares, so you can't work out what nearby W3W addresses are. Fortunately, there are some open alternatives to W3W, many of them listed on a page put together by the well-known OpenStreetMap (OSM) group. OSM also points out the main danger if W3W is widely used -- Mongolia has already adopted it as an official addressing system for the country:
What3words is fairly simple from a software point of view, and is really more about attempting establish a standard for location look-ups. It will only succeed through the network effect of persuading many people to adopt and share locations. If it does succeed, then it also succeeds in "locking in" users into the system which they have exclusive monopoly over.
Given that problem, it seems questionable that, according to the BBC story, the UK police are urging "everyone to download a smartphone app they say has already saved several lives". Since when has it been the police's job to do the marketing for companies? Moreover, in many emergencies W3W may not be needed. Eden mentions a situation described given by a W3W press release:
Person dials the emergency services
Person doesn't know their location
Emergency services sends the person a link
Person clicks on link, opens web page
Web page geolocates user and displays their W3W location
Person reads out their W3W phrase to the emergency servicesHere's the thing... If the person's phone has a data connection -- the web page can just send the geolocation directly back to the emergency services! No need to get a human to read it out, then another human to listen and type it in to a different system.There is literally no need for W3W in this scenario. If you have a data connection, you can send your precise location without an intermediary.
That seems to have been the case for the people who were lost in the forest: since they were able to download the W3W app, as suggested by the police, a Web page could have sent their geolocation to the emergency services directly. Maybe that boring technical detail is something the BBC should have mentioned in its story, along with all the heart-warming stuff.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

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posted at: 12:00am on 23-Aug-2019
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Why Is MLB Claiming Revenue From Obviously Fair Use Videos On YouTube?

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Nearly a decade ago, we wrote a bunch about an excellent book called Copyfraud, by law professor Jason Mazzone, which went into great detail about how the legacy entertainment industry companies have used copyright in ways that are clearly against copyright's intent -- to the point that they border on fraud. The concept of copyfraud should be referred to more frequently, and here's a perfect example. Just a couple months ago, we wrote about the amazing social media account of Jimmy O'Brien, who goes by @Jomboy_ on Twitter. He's combined his love of baseball, his video editing skills, his ability to read lips incredibly well, and with a sarcastic, dry sense of humor to make a ton of amazing videos about various things happening in baseball. We highlighted a bunch last time around and his profile has only grown a lot since then, including among Major League Baseball players.About a month after that post, Jomboy may have had his biggest moment so far, in putting together a truly amazing video of NY Yankees manager Aaron Boone getting ejected -- following a bunch of players and Boone arguing with a young umpire over some bad calls. What took the video from normal great to amazing was that it revealed exactly what Boone was saying to the ump during their argument thanks to a bunch of "hot mics" from the broadcast. That allowed us to learn a lot more about this argument than anyone normally does in watching a manager scream at an ump:

That video alone went crazy viral and launched an even more viral meme in the phrase "fucking savages," that is now on tons of t-shirts. Yankee fans have embraced it. The players have embraced it. By any stretch of the imagination, this was actually great for the game of baseball.So, of course, Major League Baseball wants to kill it. Because that's what MLB does. MLB's head of discipline (and a former Yankee manager himself), Joe Torre is apparently really really upset about these hot mic videos that have gotten fans so excited about the game. Because how dare fans learn about the personalities of the people in the game.
The preponderance of that information has become more common lately, as microphones have picked up what's said on the field, leaving little to the imagination. Torre will take the information, but he'd rather it wasn't available to anyone with a Twitter account.That's not the way I want to hear it, for everybody else to hear it,'' Torre said Tuesday at Yankee Stadium. I wish I could hear it, only. It makes it easy to make my decision.
Apparently, Torre met with Boone to "discuss" the hot mic "issue" (there is no issue), leading one of the Yankees' beat reporters, Bryan Hoch, to point out that this meeting was really happening because someone like Jomboy made a video:
So, first of all, this is incredibly dumb on MLB and Torre's part. Torre, of course, has famously had his own hot mic moments during ejections as well.But it gets dumber, and it involves out and out copyfraud.In response to Hoch's comment, a Twitter user joked that MLB doesn't want Jomboy "profiting off their backs." To which Jomboy noted that MLB "claims" all of his videos on YouTube, so when he has videos that get millions of views (as many of his do), it's MLB collecting the revenue.
Someone rightly points out that "it seems way beyond fair use" and Jomboy notes that he tried that once, but YouTube rejected it:
This all seems ridiculous for a whole variety of reasons. First off, this does appear to be quintessential fair use. It's a (tiny) portion of the video. It's done for reporting purposes, it's arguably transformative (the videos show a very different side of the game), and it seems to only increase the potential market for baseball, not decrease it. But, because of the system YouTube has set up here, MLB gets the money.No one is watching these videos as a replacement for MLB content. They're watching it to get Jomboy's insight, humor, lip reading skills and such. And yet, MLB is getting the money.That's blatant copyfraud.I'm sure O'Brien has little interest in antagonizing MLB (which should be celebrating him rather than worrying about his videos), so he probably has no interest in fighting this with a lawyer. But, again, that demonstrates MLB's abuse of power here. It knows that it can take the money from Jomboy's work and he can't push back very hard or he'll run into other problems with MLB.Either way, I'm wondering about all those folks who show up in our comments saying stuff about how strong copyright is necessary to "protect creators" feel about this situation? Here a creator is getting robbed of revenue he should legitimately have earned, because YouTube is handing it to a giant corporation instead.

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posted at: 12:00am on 23-Aug-2019
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