[jeroenhd]

Perhaps if they reside in, operate from or actively serve the US. In other parts of the world, software patents are unenforceable (as only implementations of ideas can be patented, not the ideas themselves).

Based on their wordlist, they do seem to use American English (so they are probably not located in the UK) but the authors can still operate this project from anywhere in the world.

Mapping some bits of data to a short set of words or pictures isn't even new, neither is the hashing step to ensure that similar coordinates don't use the same name. Validating (session) keys by hashing the key to generate a fingerprint and turning that into words (or these days, emoji) was invented before W3W was conceived. The patent itself is quite flimsy, considering it's just applying some formulas to do something that was already being done on basically any data.