The great Unwashed?
That would be me–
Not exactly the same but ages ago when I was drafting our plant layout I included the railroad tracks that ran behind the building and if you zoomed in on a particular section of the track you would see the CEOs car and a message that said “Fuck you Frank!”
I wonder if anyone ever found it.
They exist in certain types of reference books - dictionaries, encyclopaedias, maybe concordances etc.
You can certainly cite an incorrect fact with impunity. You can even use it in your own work without any reference to the original. The only way it becomes a copyright violation is if the expression of that statement is copied directly and then it doesn’t matter whether it is correct or not.
In high school I had dinner with a friend and met his parents. His Dad was a cartographer. He said copyright traps certainly existed, though they shouldn’t, but its difficult to prove someone lifted your hard work, but even then it’d only catch the most flagrant and lazy violators. He said there were details a skilled cartographer could add that served the same purpose, but didn’t add fictional elements. Still, he said copyright violation was rampant. He also foamed at the mouth if you ever mentioned rand McNally - mediocre maps who are only big because they happen to big already and have a recognizable name. People don’t know what a truely good quality map is like and so just buy McNally because they don’t know any better.
Actually, the whole family was over the top strange.
True, but then its still plagurism.
I think we’re talking at cross purposes now. The only consequence I was talking about was the author’s ability to identify when his/her work has been plagiarised.
I’m still skeptical.
I’m still spectacle.
The whole and only point of a copyright trap is to enable the creator to identify when work has been plagiarized. It must be invented for a compilation of public data. For an original book, even one of nonfiction, it is entirely unnecessary. It also is unworkable because there is no way to tell an honest citation from a dishonest one. By definition, all citations of copyright traps are dishonest. The two are not the same thing and can’t be confused for one another.
But since I’d be amazed is pplepic ever returned to the explain his or her odd comment I agree we should let this drop.
Years ago, in another life and career, I worked for a digital mapping company, and I was instructed to add digital streets where none were in reality, then capture the location as an artifact to be used to protect against unauthorized copying of the digital maps. Indeed, those were copywright traps, and I am sure current digital mapmakers today use them.
It would be easy to add a digital street and make it un-navigable to a GPS unit, but it could still be visible, or present in the map data files.
The above comments about non-existant streets that were digitized from old USGS quadrants rings true - back in the day, those maps were used to form the base map, then positions of roads were corrected, and new roads added via aerial photography. Sometimes non-existant streets were removed, and sometimes not. Then we started using GPS to get more accurate positioning, along with field surveying.
Today the mapmaking is more sophisticated - you may have seen the Google cars which has equipment to capture exact position (GPS), and video, which confirms turning restrictions, one-way streets, and other navigating conditions. I assume Google will also build traps into their data as well.
I should have been more specific. The only context I can think of that pplepic’s claim makes any sense is if he/she is the author (or significant contributor) of a nonfiction work that someone is likely to copy verbatim and publish as their own original work as opposed to just citing it - a dictionary or something similarly dry and factual.
I remember a non-existent street in a Thomas Bros. Guide map book of the San Francisco Bay Area, circa 1997 or so (before they were swallowed up by Big Map (Rand McNally)). It was located in the middle of Sunnyvale and it stood out to me only because I lived a few blocks away from its purported location.
The main road in our neighborhood is shown on Google Maps as extending well past its dead end. Yet their street view of course stops at the right point. No other map service shows this. I have sometimes wondered if this was a copyright trap. Making a dead end longer than it is wouldn’t really harm anyone following GPS directions. There is no there there.
As to copyright traps in books: there are copies and then there are copies. I have noticed numerous obvious typos in eBooks that aren’t there in the originals. Some, decades old. I wonder if these are traps in the sense that they uniquely identify a given copy of an eBook so that if it ends up on the Net, the publisher knows whose copy it was that got posted so they can sue someone. Having a couple dozen instances of such typos that may or may not be in a given copy is more than enough.
I’ve seen the argument that a particular expression of a fact was not copied but independently arrived at, since it was the most natural way of expressing the concept. That defense doesn’t work at all if the fact was false.
It seems kind of pointless since a large amount of copying can be detected, and a small amount would probably not include the trap. If the copier did small changes then it might be still useful.
Any urban area will have dozens, perhaps hundreds of “paper streets”—streets that were dedicated but never built. These are utterly bedeviling for mapmakers like myself, because there’s generally no way to know what’s on the ground except to drive out there and check it. For one of my clients, I update maps of a couple dozen New Mexico and Colorado towns each year. Every year I get the updated GIS files from the county. Those show a bunch of streets dedicated back in the 1970s that have never existed. I know from experience that they probably didn’t magically appear this year, either. But the GIS files will also help me spot a new subdivision that’s been platted out by the country club. Now which of those streets should I show? All of them? The ones I think will be driveable this year (most modern subdivisions are built in phases)? When I first started, it was rare for aerial photos to be flown more than once a decade. Now, in most areas, I can look at aerials no more than three years old—but those don’t help me with something just platted last summer.
Virtually everything laymen guess to be a copyright trap is merely a paper street that went undetected, or some other mistake. Since the 1991 Feist decision, there’s been absolutely no legal point to proving copying, because factual works—even false facts introduced to trap copiers—cannot be the subject of copyright in the US.
There’s a half-paper street only two blocks from me. It runs, that is, half a block (and there is a house on it), and then dead-ends at a barrier instead of continuing to the next street, though the borough engineering map shows it as connecting through. Thanks to foliage, aerials are useless. It typically takes me three years to get through to any new map company what the situation is.
For anyone who’s curious, this is Chatham (Borough), NJ, Vine Street. True connection to Minton Ave, false connection to Talmadge Avenue.
That is so weird. Why did that happen? What is where the “phantom street” is? Why is there that little stub of a street on the Talmadge side?
Also, now I know where to stalk you. I will hang around Vine St., looking for the 6’8" man with a silver mane, eyes like fire, and a raffish silk scarf.
When I was between jobs one time (meaning broke, but not down and out) I had to deliver phone books in LA county to san Diego county. I was given copies of Thomas brothers maps to use for the area the phone books would be distributed in.
Most of the yellow page phone books wound up in people’s driveways instead of the front door, because at 5 cents a phone book, plus paying my own gas it was just not possible to walk every street.
I found many streets on my maps that were not even there, but they got phone books anyway wink, wink.
What with one thing and another, I think Vine used to be a true street all the way through, but (thirty or more years ago) it was severed to discourage people from using it as a rush-hour bypass for Main St. They couldn’t completely remove the Minton-Vine section, because there was one house on the south side of the west end, but there were only sides of houses on the north side and the east end. So they put up a barrier, which can be walked through, but not driven. The remnant of the east end is now used as a driveway by a house on Talmadge.
(There is another point of interest. Talmadge was originally developed almost a hundred years ago, not as a street, but as a right-of-way for the Morris County Traction Company, a trolley line intended to run from Dover [with a connection all the way to Pennsylvania] to Elizabeth. The line ran on a partial route for about a decade, but, what with the growth of automobiles, it was shut down and torn up even before it was finished. In Morris Township, Madision, and Chatham, the line ran parallel to the regular railroad [and bits of it are still preserved as a walking/bicycling path] but turned south at the east end of Chatham to get to Summit. When the line was torn up, Talmadge Avenue was built along that north-south segment down to Vine. The rest of the old right-of-way continues south as a straight and somewhat elevated footpath to the river, where the piers of either end of the trolley bridge to Summit remain to this day.)