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.
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.