Saw a very good response from Cecil Adams about imaginary streets, parks and towns put on maps in order to discourage possible copyright plagiarism. It was an old article, from 1991, I think. It must have been before the Internet.
Anyway, we had maps of Delaware with imaginary towns on them. I remember some in particular in Sussex County: Dorothy’s Roost, Missionary Outreach, Angola, Zippidy, Ursula’s Corner, Plastic. We used to write those down. They were just dots on the map, but we went off to find them anyway.
None were there or anywhere else…except one: Angola, which has since disappeared from the map, but we found a place called that anyway, a crossroads with a post office and a few houses hidden behind a very tall hedge not visible from the highway. We drove in and there was a central turn around and an IGA store. Also a hardware. The hardware guy said it was not a “publicized” town and they did not want a lot of visitors. He said something like “buy something and leave.”
It was a very strange experience. But the other towns are no longer on the most recent maps. What if someone went looking for them again?
You have to be careful before assuming that something is a copyright trap. Sometimes maps preserve memories of villages that have vanished, but which can plainly be seen as real on street-level maps of another century. Not far from me, for example, are East Madison and Stanley, NJ, which are today undistinguished geographic areas in Madison and Chatham Boroughs, but which were real villages in the mid-1800s. (They ceased to grow when the railroad bypassed them, shrank out of existence when the automobile took away what little point they had left, and were redeveloped as housing tracts in the booms of the 1920s and 1950s.)
Phantom streets, too, can have other causes. There are several nonexistent streets near me that are on commercial maps because they’re on the Borough Engineer’s official maps. The town doesn’t want to build the streets now, but wants there to be no question that they could build them someday if they wanted to.
While perhaps not as blatant as having whole new towns, the Ordnance Survey in the UK has admitted to there being certain “design elements” that are distinctive to their maps.
I know the student union of my university, back in the 1970’s, used to publish a phone book of all the students. (ah, the innocent pre-internet days!!) The guy in charge mentioned that they added a few bogus names with legitimate addresses to ensure they would find anyone using the directory for direct mailing without paying to use it as a mailing list.
OTOH, I live in a fairly new area. The streets are in transition between the rural grid and the new subdivisions, and what connections there are have been plowed over, re-routed, or are still planned. I look at the local city maps each year to see what they think is right. The GPS units may not tell you correct routes, and the newer subdivision areas are not on some maps. (I.e. google maps).
I think it was Napoleon who said “Never ascribe to malice what can best be explained by incompetence.”
Just because those names are on the maps doesn’t mean it has to be a town, it could just be a place name. After awhile the cartographers want to change the way the map looks for one reason or another so they get rid of some of the names. There are tons and tons of the places, at least on the east coast, like that. Sometimes there are signs, sometimes it’s a cross road, sometimes just someone’s old farm that’s not there any more.
Creating a map is a lot of work, don’t think that they are going to be putting lots of these little fake places on the map just to catch people, they’re not. They might put some, but they will be small and few. I do remember one turning up near me, it was a small road that lead to a few houses, the map had it with two entrances, there was only one, but because it was on the corner it was easy to add and if someone went looking for that second entrance they’d be a hundred feet off or so and no one would care.
There was an article 10 years ago or so in a cartographical magazine that was saying something about how the courts were not taking the sides of the map companies as much since you can not copyright facts, just the presentation of the facts. So while you can just copy a map and try and sell it you can use it as a base map. Colors, line weights, text placement is what they would try and get you on, not the placement of a road or town.
This sounds straight out of The League of Gentlemen, a BBC comedy from the turn of the last millenium! They had an ongoing sketch about “the local shop for local people”, run by a grusome, unsavoury couple, totally freaked out by any outsider. An “unpublicized town” would fit perfectly.
More on topic, I remember watching a programme on the history of London A-Z map, when the presenter discovered a non-existing road in the current edition. An editor claimed a copyright safeguard, but I actually wandered at the time if they weren’t trying to cover up a real blunder - though it’s probably just my paranoid nature, if they admit a trick, there must have some ulterior motive.
OTOH, a cartographer told me once about an argument with her colleagues, who wanted to omit some paths in a National Park, so that the great unwashed wouldn’t trample the wilderness.
Burkittsville, MD, the town where The Blair Witch Project was filmed, sure didn’t encourage tourism. While the town exists, the roads didn’t quite sync up with road maps of the late 90s and all the roads from the highway were one way going out; the road going in was kind of a local secret.
Things may have changed in the decade since, but I never went back.
I have no idea what you’re talking about Burkittsville has two roads running in and out, neither of which has ever been a one way street. MD 17, the major road, runs from US340 up through Middletown and beyond and is a 50mph road. The other road runs up the mountain and into Washington county. Every map I have and can remember seeing has the correct roads running in and out.
The Blair Witch movie wasn’t shot in Burkittsville, it was shot in Montgomery county, about 30 miles away. That maybe why people think the roads don’t look the same because they are not. I also believe that the town took down a lot of signs because people kept stealing them.
The Frank Saberhagen short story “The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron” uses a
copyright trap as the story premise.
In the distant future, evil robots get an encyclopedia that mentions a remote
planet. When the robots get there, there’s no one to kill and no fuel to steal.
They used all their fuel to get there, and now can’t go anywhere.
When I was growing up, maps had a town named “Beixedon” listed near us. There was a small housing development (maybe 25 houses) called “Beixedon Estates,” but not an actual community (no one ever said they were from Beixedon, for example). The map listing never used “Estates,” either. I suspect this was a type of copyright trap – showing a place that existed, but would not have been included on a map.
Cecil mentions that a cartographer, apparently on his own, slipped in a fake street or something on a map. Perhaps his little private joke. It happens, because my kid brother who became an engineer (after a couple of beers) liked to tell me about his naughty little habit of laying out, say an automobile panel and slipping in a couple of little holes that went nowhere and did nothing. He even attached a little swivel cover to cover the holes. He did this simply to break the monotony of his work. Far as I know he was never challenged or questioned about these sorts of little pranks. So I imagine cartographers and others are not immune to this. In my own case, I’ve always slipped little copyright traps into my books, not that I really think anyone would likely want to steal one, but I figure, what the heck. :smack:
At one time, back in the day, Mapquest showed several streets in this area that never existed and would in fact be underwater in Puget Sound. They were apparently derived from old city maps, where the area had been platted out as part of a plan to fill in the area after a dredging project that was never completed.
It also showed, and perhaps still does, a Panera Bread location at the end of a dead end street in a residential neighborhood near me. There isn’t one, there never was one, and I can’t imagine that there was even ever a plan to build one there, but the reviews that people had posted for it were good for a laugh.
I’m trying to imagine what you could mean by this and failing. You can’t slip a copyright trap into an original book. That has no meaning. You can only do it to compilations of publicly available data. Maps, dictionaries, phone books, things of that nature.
But they’re unnecessary in books. A map looks like any other map and you could photocopy it, file off the identifying information, and call it your own.
But a book is unique. You can’t take more than a paragraph or two for it to be obvious it matched another one.