If they then said if you ever allow any other payment method we will charge you for EVERY transaction ever made since you used our system.

Can you refer us the equivalent term in the W3W T&Cs cos I think you are making it up again.

Hmmm, they have a clause in their T&Cs

They have a whole load of clauses and definitions.
(and a whole extra contract for NGO/charities referred to from this)
Unless you read it cover to cover several times with highlighters the licensing is very much more restrictive than it first appears.

As is not uncommon they also reserve the right to change the licensing.
The difference here is that much of the rest of the license binds the client to it.

This isn’t like some CRM or PM tool where you can export your data to use in another product, indeed even trying to do that is expressly forbidden.

Apparently hands.face.space is near Llandudno

Can you refer us the equivalent term in the W3W T&Cs cos I think you are making it up again.

Ah, like I was making it up that they only MAY allow NGO’s and charities to use it for free?

the equivalent term in the W3W T&Cs

As I stated and showed earlier the individual clauses relate to each other, definitions and schedules.

Do you actually understand what this actually means in practice?

“3 Word Address Location” means the latitude and longitude coordinates derived from a 3 Word Address (with or without the corresponding 3 Word Address).”

they now own that specific latitude and longitude which is only derivable using their proprietary algorithm for transformation. (any latitude and longitude set is only derivable via a specific algorithm so for example given a location and lat/lon you can work out which algorithms were used)

In case the above isn’t clear…

bold mine…
again note “may” and that the lat/lon can’t be passed on without

Facilitation Period. As an exception to Clauses 6.3(a) and 6.3(c) above, if you have been granted a limited facilitation period, as notified to you by what3words in writing, you may be entitled to pass on the latitude/longitude coordinates derived from a 3 Word Address to your delivery drivers strictly in order to facilitate deliveries to your customers (the “Facilitation Period”). This exception shall automatically expire 6 months from the date of what3words’ written notification of its grant, at which point you shall no longer pass on the aforementioned latitude/longitude coordinates and all of the restrictions set out in Clauses
6.1 shall apply without any exception. what3words also expressly reserves the right to
automatically terminate the Facilitation Period with you at any time by notifying you in
writing (email will suffice) and/or by amending the Terms from time to time. Other than the
foregoing, this Agreement shall continue to apply in its entirety and the Facilitation Period is
subject to your continued compliance with these Terms.

I am 50% positive that *.terms.conditions will be in an ocean. I’ve tried 8 starter words (spurious, suspect, suspicious, dodgy, boring, closed, fragile, lovely). I CBA to investigate further. Don’t say I never do anything for you.

@stevextc – I don’t have time in my life to argue all your points with you over and over. But:

The licensing prevents reverse lookups anyway

Clearly thats not actually true since they license an API to do exactly that. What you’ve quoted is half a clause, which makes no sense without the previous sentence that “In particular” is expanding upon. Given they offer an Excel Plugin which they show converting and displaying a whole table of locations/words I don’t think the interpretation you are making is the one they intend – an API which cannot display its output is pretty pointless, so you have to read it in the context of the replicating our service.

and can prevent emergency services using other systems.

this is the bit that I still don’t understand… where in their T&Cs does it say if Ambulance Service X uses W3W it must stop using OS maps, GPS coords etc?

Then you claimed it was equivalent to paypal saying:

If they then said if you ever allow any other payment method we will charge you for EVERY transaction ever made since you used our system.

but there’s nothing in the T&Cs which suggests anything of the sort.

I do think the use of the word “may” in the terms is clumsy and lazy. I interpret that to mean, if we have explicitly told your that this clause applies to you then it does. That way they are no obligated to offer that service to every NGO/charity if they don’t like its aims.

Of course if your were a governmental organisation negotiating a license you may well not be using the standard terms anyway.

You also stated:

“It’s not your choice. Emergency services refused to attend a 10 fig grid ref unless someone walked off the hill to get a mobile signal to download W3W…”

Now of course nobody else here can prove that didn’t happen but somehow it doesn’t really seem likely to be exactly what happened. The ambulance guy can’t use a grid ref because he doesn’t know how to (especially a 10fig one) not because he is prohibited from doing so; he doesn’t have a map, the crew don’t have a map, he doesn’t have the training, his system is expecting a postcode etc. – W3W hasn’t made a problem here, the problem was always there that call handler was not trained what to do with a grid ref – and probably would have been better if you called the police rather than ambulance even if this hill wasn’t really in mountain rescue terrain because at least they would have been able to find someone who could translate what you were saying (assuming nobody could google and find this https://gridreferencefinder.com/os.php).

But then you can’t even decide if it is:

The license terms when I looked were pretty clear

or

Unless you read it cover to cover several times with highlighters the licensing is very much more restrictive than it first appears

@stevextc cool, whatever, you seem determined that W3W are “evil mega corp”

I tend with Poly’s view, those are standard terms in a contract, as a company that seems pretty keen on good PR I can’t quite square your fatalistic interpretation of the their own licence especially with regards to charities that rescue people, it would after all, look pretty stupid given their recently Telly Ad push. As other’s have suggested on the thread, I think many folk overestimate the resources that emergency services’ control rooms have at their disposal, and overestimate the training that call handlers receive. For my purposes W3W presents just another alternative for easy location.

Now of course nobody else here can prove that didn’t happen but somehow it doesn’t really seem likely to be exactly what happened

Yet another member had the same experience in the same county.

I don’t have time in my life to argue all your points with you over and over.

and presumably you don’t have time to download the entire license and pour through it…

I do think the use of the word “may” in the terms is clumsy and lazy.

where in their T&Cs does it say if Ambulance Service X uses W3W it must stop using OS maps, GPS coords etc?

The license terms when I looked were pretty clear

or

Unless you read it cover to cover several times with highlighters the licensing is very much more restrictive than it first appears

Taken as a whole, cross referenced and expanded they are clear to anyone that reads contracts as a part of their job and understands how geodesics work.

I’ve lost count of the number of huge commercial companies that have fallen foul of contractual terms through ignoring exact wording and wishful thinking and ended up making out of court settlements. The lawyers question procurement and procurement answer in ignorance because they don’t actually understand and then when they get caught by the trap and hit with a huge invoice it all escalates.

Whole companies exist who’s entire continued existence is based on checking for contract breaches to their license that in retrospect was unavoidable. Well over 50% of revenue is generated not by selling new things but by finding contract breaches that someone thought didn’t apply.

This (in my personal experience) is particularly prevalent with geodesic data because it is so easy to create the traps due to a general misunderstanding of geodesics and lack of knowledge of the licensing by the people who use the data and a “surely they don’t actually mean that” approach.

You don’t actually hear about these because commercial companies with shareholders don’t want this to be made public so they just pay up and it gets lost in the annual financial report.
9/10 times my involvement only starts after the invoice .. (though I do have a colleague who used to work for one of these companies who’s job was license enforcement) .. the first question from execs is usually not “how did we do this” but “how do they know”… which is pretty simple, they just encode small conversion variants that get propagated and location data is usually poorly understood and considered a trivial bit of data by the people using the larger data that is linked to it.

The next question from execs is usually “what other data have we got that we might end up in the same position” …
Sadly the answer is “we don’t really know… probably loads”

Huge multinationals get caught out on this.. the solution is simply to pay-up the backdated licence fees.
I find it improbable that government or NGO procurement is going to be so much “better”… not to put too fine a point on it our government is the same one that procured ferries from a company with no ferries…

Nickc

whatever, you seem determined that W3W are “evil mega corp”

I tend with Poly’s view, those are standard terms in a contract, as a company that seems pretty keen on good PR I can’t quite square your fatalistic interpretation of the their own licence especially with regards to charities that rescue people, it would after all, look pretty stupid given their recently Telly Ad push

As has been drummed into me .. “don’t read what you want to read but play out explaining this being cross examined in front of a court”

I’m a big fan of “never assign to malice what can be explained as incompetence” but in this I’m erring on the side of caution.

I have no TV so haven’t seen TV ads but I’ve seen FB and internet ads …
They don’t have any actual product that isn’t trivial to reproduce … but they have VC money for advertising.
Obviously the targeted ads aimed at me are biased but I find it hard to believe the VC’s paid for the advertising but not a contract/license.

Evil is an interpretation … what concerns me is the model is to force people to download the app for a emergency service. This might be benign but they wouldn’t be the first company to find the business model fails and then turn “nasty” and the investors walk away with millions.

what concerns me is the model is to force people to download the app for a emergency service.

Dude, you can’t blame W3W for doing something that you’ve made up in your head.

which is pretty simple, they just encode small conversion variants

And in the old days… ghost elements on maps. Lots of famous examples of this catching out companies passing off mapping data as their own.

In this example, they can just choose to occasional vary the coding, to prove if their rules on retaining position/code pairs are being broken. Even reading just the small contact extracts you have posted show that they are warning that they may do that.