I saw this on my breakfast cereal box (in the US) and looked it up. A company called Navilens made this to help visually impaired people with things like street signs, etc… neat!
EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I forgot I am on lemmy so we’re discussing the technology and licensing issues, instead of focusing on how this might improve the lives of visually impaired people.
It certainly beats an independent system for every single city or service, but the chosen design limits the functionality of the tags once the service shuts down. You can’t archive the codes, and you can’t generate your own like you can with QR codes.
Had they color-coded their own special ID around a normal QR code with a URL, I wouldn’t have had as much of an issue with these. They actually do have such a system, but they advertise it as an alternative rather than the default.
QR codes wouldn’t solve this problem, because they would still house a link that has to be opened in the NaviLens app to be of any use.
These codes don’t just take you to some static document. It opens up in the NaviLens app, which when use features like the gps, gyro, and camera in your phone to provide more rich, contextual information.