Copyright infringement aside, naming the project "WhatFreeWords" seems to teeter very close to trademark infringement. The legal term if I recall is "deceptively similar" which the OSS project arguably is.
The What3Words word list is 40,000 words long. It is important that words in this list cannot be confused, otherwise they may be communicated incorrectly. For example band/banned, bare/bear, beat/beet are easily confused.
A quick inspection of their word list finds the following words that sound very, very similar to one another:
equivalence equivalents
incidence incidents
incite insight
incompetence incompetents
independence independents
innocence innocents
instance instants
intense intents
lightening lightning
ordinance ordnance
e.g.:
https://twitter.com/matthewwilkes/status/1388772924627333121
https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...
> The overwhelming proportion of similar-sounding 3 word combinations will be so far apart that an error is obvious,
However, it continues like this:
> but there will still be cases where potentially confusable word combinations are nearby. Our Autosuggest feature actively intercepts possible errors or confusions and highlights other possibilities to the user, helping to identify what might need to be checked.
So they rely on auto-suggest and people trying all suggested alternatives.
[1] https://support.what3words.com/en/articles/3577589-how-are-t...
Ironic ionic ;-)
https://www.bitlaw.com/guidance/trademark/dealing-with-a-con...
Despite a massive social media campaign that would have certainly caught the eye of Starbucks, they received no legal threats.
If I were arguing for W3W, I would point out that in some dialects of British English (where W3W is based), "what three words" and "what free words" would be pronounced identically. This means that in verbal communication, it would be very difficult to tell the two apart. That would make it harder to win a parody case, since in spoken language people wouldn't even be able to tell that you were saying something different.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/trademark-parody-and-freed...