What kind of editor would fire a writer over using an unfamiliar word? That makes no sense. Editors and writers (and teachers and students, I should think) actually talk about things like this. There would be a discussion about it.
That’s not my understanding of Feist at all. Copyright traps are still potentially useful as a way to prove copying, which is a necessary element of a copyright infringement claim. Feist is not about proving whether copying has occurred, but rather on what kind of work or what aspects of a work is protected by copyright law.
Tour guides are not known for their rigorous standards.
They take off and land into the wind, which is usually in from the sea, so take offs are over the sea but landings aren’t. Final approach takes planes right over the top of Inglewood.
If you still had that map, I’d be very interested to see a photo or scan.
I think this is right. The court ruled that the purpose of copyright under the US Constitution was to promote science and art, not reward people who gather information. Being able to prove that someone copied your list of towns in Oklahoma or your list of names, birthplaces, and batting averages of all US professional baseball players in 1985 is irrelevant to a copyright claim because those kinds of lists are not protected by copyright law.
I think it has to be remembered that paper streets are “real” – like a new corporation, they have legal existwnce, even if there’s not yet anything there to point to. That is, the city, county, or whatever municipal authority gives approval to laying out of streets, has done so, and the developer may build them at his leisure, when he gets to that point in building his development. And if he goes broke, or abandons the project, well, they’re still there until the city/county/whatever rescinds the authorization. (Authorizing a street [“Yeah, you can put in a street there”] is different from acceptance of a street (“On inspection, we find you did a good job building it, and we’ll be willing to take over maintenance”].)
Maps of my hometown had the rather stupid coding of using dashed lines to represent both private streets, physically real streets where title and maintence lay to the abutting landowners, and paper streets not yet built. Ohio Street School, built when I was about 10 on an undeveloped tract along the north side of Ohio Street, had the interesting effect of wiping out several blocks of paper streets where three streets which physically ended at Ohio Street had legally extended north to dead ends, and a cross street that had never had physical existence all lost their legal existence as wel.
Several miles north of this was a quite real road which I am still not sure if the naming was a copyright trap or a perpetuated mishearing, but several different maps depicted “Noseville Road”, a rather strange name. Many years later they all one by one corrected this to the more accurate Knowlesville Road.
Just to nitpick here, it’s not that it’s irrelevant to a claim of infringement. It is definitely relevant. It’s just that it’s not the only element of an infringement claim. You also have to show that what was copied was actually protected by copyright law (and other things).
Several years ago a friend named Pat took a motorcycle trip form Texas to Florida, and noticed that in Mississippi, not that far off his planned route, was a town named “Pat,” so he took a little detour to go there - probably to take a picture of himself at the city limits sign or something. But there was no town there at all. He figured he had stumbled onto a copyright trap.
A bunch of years ago, I moved from one home to another in the same neighborhood. The new home was on a very small street, only one block long, and I was already quite familiar with it. When I got involved in all my Change-Of-Address paperwork, I went to the USPS website to find my new ZIP+4 code, and entered the address of the new place. It’s an interesting site – not only does it give you the ZIP+4 code, but it also standardizes the address per Post Office preferences. For example, it puts everything in upper-case and changes both “Road” and “Rd” to “RD”.
In my case, though, it also changed the spelling of the name of the street. It was a very minor change, and would be pronounced the same either way, but still, I was intrigued: Have I been reading the street sign incorrectly all these years? As it turned out, the street sign at one end of the block was exactly as I remembered it, but the street sign at the other end used the Post Office spelling.
In other words: If the city can’t even use the same spelling on the two street signs, how can we expect the mapmakers to know which is correct?
Was it a plat book? These are what you find in the recorder’s office - it simply means that the owner has sub-divided the property into lots and laid out the routes of the streets - this is filed before (perhaps an eternity before) any development starts.
(I once worked one summer with a tiny Civil Engineering company.
One of the "engineers (he bought his way into the job - the owner needed money badly) had us draw up the plat book and actually survey and mark the lots - BEFORE soil testing. The water table was 2’ below surface.
There is now an incredibly well design soy bean field in Bartholomew County, IN
I work in academia, and I would be pretty surprised if a professor (or TA) devoted that much time and attention to a minor mistake. A high school teacher would probably care even less. Something like “esquivalience” might merit a “?” in the margin, but not a 100+ word comment and a below average grade.
Many years ago (before anybody had a GPS in their car), the most popular brand of map books here labelled a building in an industrial suburb as a “Boomerang Factory.” At the time I happened to be working in the area and while having lunch at a sandwich shop, a couple of flustered tourists came in asking for directions because they couldn’t find the Boomerang Factory which was marked on their map.
That would be because there never was one. I wonder how many tourists over the years wasted time looking in vain for the factory. There is nothing touristy nearby either, so it would be a genuinely wasted trip.
Usually not, at least for urban areas where one of the three mapping data companies (Nokia, TeleAtlas, or Google) have done fieldwork to verify which paper streets exist. However, I work in some small towns in New Mexico that those guys haven’t yet gotten to, where purely theoretical street grids appear in the TIGER data, so in that case your satnav might indeed tell you to turn right into a beanfield. Have a look at Springer, N.M., to see some examples of that (used to be much worse). Have a look at Carrizozo, N.M., to see the opposite issue. There’s a whole new fancy subdivision just east of town, but Google doesn’t yet know the names of any of the streets that have been there for at least three years now. In both cases, Here.com is much better than Google—and the maps I do for the local phone book are better still.
Exactly, though it was several decades after the houses were built. In the 1990s, I think, LAX bought and removed all the houses in the Vista del Mar subdivision.
But after Feist, there’s no point to proving copying, because factual works—even false facts introduced to trap copiers—cannot be the subject of copyright in the US.
Last year I completely redrew the street map for my hometown, because an updated version had not been published in several years.
I’m a town employee with access to all kinds of official materials and to various public officials themselves. It was still a pain to get everything right and I’m not sure I did.
First of all, in the 1990s some close-sounding street names in town were changed when 911 emergency calling was instituted. This was to avoid confusion to responders to emergencies. Now newer maps of town do not match older maps.
Second, paper streets, some of which appear on Google Maps, do not actually exist IRL.
Third, there are brand new, named accepted roads that had not yet appeared in print anywhere except on developers’ plans approved by the Planning Board.
Fourth, there were earlier mapmakers mistakes.
Fifth, there was changed shoreline due to erosion, old “islands” that are really rocks covered by water at high tide.
Sixth, there were some places that had three or four nicknames–these were also little islands or shoreline necks–that I could never find an official name for.
Keeping in mind that I’ve lived here all my life (almost 55 years) and had this much trouble with familiar territory, I’m not at all surprised people find oddities in maps assembled by outsiders with no local knowledge whatsoever.
Here in Anderson, Indiana, a little over half a mile from my house, 3 different maps showed two streets that never existed. At the end of Redwood Lane, there’s a swampy woods where the maps said Hickory Drive and another one that escapes me now existed. My Garmin navigator showed them, though they aren’t on the update.
I always figured some developer got city permits to build those streets, but ran out of money to get it done. It didn’t occur to me that they might be copyright traps. Maybe I’ll drop by the courthouse someday to get the real story.
We met the occasional driver, on dog walks, who wondered where Hickory Drive was. I can guess they were political party canvassers. No real harm was done to them, only confusion.
The street on Russian Hill was a 1 block dead end off a street which defines “Hill” as used in SF - it is nearly vertical. Nobody has build on it in 100 years, and nobody will. It was ID’d as a trap by the SF Chronicle (a thing called a “noospapr” or some such thing, you don’t know about them…).
The town in PA is the dying town made famous in a shot of Three Mile Island nuclear plant when it went “oopps! our bad”. It is on the bank immediately adjacent to TMI. Population maybe 100 in the mid-80’s. Yocumtown is the name on my Rand McNally atlas of 1991 - I no longer have my original maps I collected over the years.
When I was in journalism school, I got dinged for using a slang word. I protested that it was a perfectly fine word and the instructor said “Show me in the dictionary.” Of course, being slang, it hadn’t been included in a dictionary. However, had I been able to show the instructor an “official” source, i.e.,* if it had been in the dictionary*, I would’ve been in the clear.
Thats a good point. These patches of sediment in a river or estuary can be all sorts of confusing - you might be sure looking at an unnamed Island, so you go back to some old maps to find a name… looking at some hand drawn map, you see the rough shape of the river but its very different now… so there’s an Island , and there’s the name !
Now you are in print, Mr Long Life comes in and says “How can you make such a mistake, my father died on that Island (now a patch of rocks), and you’ve gone and given its name to some new upstart of an island half a mile away !”.
