Which is exactly the feature he's abusing here: he's introducing error in the form of non-QRCode data in the middle of his QRCode, which eats away (significantly) at the error correction in order to look pretty.
"Abuse" is a relative term. Denso may not have introduced error correction for the use case of inserting aesthetic elements into the barcode, but hey, it works.
MogoTix inserts its logo into QR codes as a form of branding and identification, and we have not encountered any error correction issues whatsoever.
> Denso may not have introduced error correction for the use case of inserting aesthetic elements into the barcode, but hey, it works.
Error correction was introduced because the physical media degrades and even in the best case capture is not ideal. Therefore error correction is a requirement to correctly round-trip digital information printed on an analog media. By abusing error correction mechanisms for cutesy purposes you increase the chances of complete digitalization failure significantly, sometimes (if you use all available error correction) to the point where the tag can only be scanned under absolutely perfect conditions.
You seem to be making the argument that because full use of error correction can sometimes make a QR code unreadable, no non-QR code data should ever be inserted into a QR code.
