There was this case in Britain a few years ago. I’ve meant to ask for a while; does anyone know how the Ordnance Survey found out their maps were being copied? Was there a copyright trap, and if so, does anyone know what it was?
I have no idea what the circumstances of the case were, but I worked in a typography company for a while, and copyright traps were definitely real. Deliberate misspellings, roads to nowhere, or mislabelling of towns and villages with the wrong population size key.
OK, Google gives me an article in the Guardian that says OS used “fingerprints”:
but:
Thanks for that. I had forgotten that it was settled out of court, so we didn’t get to hear any of the evidence.
Thanks for sharing this story. Good on the Ordnance Survey!
Sometimes in Thomas Guides it’s not something so glaring as a fictitious town, street, or dead end, but rather just an obscure topographic feature.
Here, at a portion of San Vicente Blvd. between Fairfax and Wilshire (Carthay Circle) in Los Angeles, there’s a raised medium in the middle of the boulevard that has only a few breaks to make left turns. (Zoom in and you can see where.) On the Thomas Guide they put in a break that doesn’t really exist. I found out when I was driving a taxi and, using the TG, was counting on that particular break, only to find it wasn’t there. I almost lost the passenger because of this.
And pissed off cab drivers.
G. Odoreida, since not everyone coming to this thread has approached it the same way you did and since we can’t read your mind, it is always a good idea to provide a link to the column in question right up front-like.
Perhaps this is the one we are discussing: Do maps have copyright traps…?
Thanks, Rick!
Around here it is standard practice to put the name and address of someone your key staff won’t recognise (your maternal grandmother is a good one) as a trap in your client list. When a member of staff leaves and rips off your client list and sends all your clients a letter soliciting their business in breach of their employment contract, they inadvertantly send your grandmother (a) notification that they are in breach and (b) proof that they are in breach.
Neat.
I recently discovered what I can only assume is a copyright trap street not one mile from my house, on Google Maps (or more precisely, on the TeleAtlas data that Google uses).
Macklin Street does not exist. Never has. If you look on the satellite view, you can see that it’s just an access leading to some garages at the end of Gibbs Way.
If there’s one in my small English town, then I can only assume they’re fairly widespread!
Not all phantom streets are copyright traps, though. There’s one two blocks from my house that is found on many maps, including the official map of the Borough Engineer. Apparently it’s legally a street, so that the borough can pave it someday if it wants to, but it is being left unpaved for the present because, if it existed, people would use it to drive theough a quiet residential neighborhood to bypass rush-hour traffic.
I’m not sure if it’s just my town, or if Google has an excessive number of copyright traps, but there are a LOT of mislabeled and non-existent streets listed in my town. Just looking at one small area of the map, I can see James Parade mislabeled as “Crambling Street”, a fictitious road named “The Downs” running through a park that doesn’t even have a footpath in it, “Cross’s Road” labeled “Cross Road” and lots of small unnamed “streetlets” that run off existing streets that simply do not have a real-world counterpart. Dismissing them as unpaved vehicular access areas might make sense of some of them, but then raises questions about other similar access areas in the same zone that aren’t depicted the same way. Oh, and one of the major roads through my town (Grey Street) is marked alternatively most of the way along as “Tyers Road”, even though that’s a completely different road that runs north-south, not east-west.
Check it out yourself if you’re curious. Search for "The Downs Traralgon " and go to satellite view, then turn off labels. You’ll see it’s an empty green belt, not a road. Maybe our town council plans to put a road through there at some stage but I’ll be surprised if they do due to the configuration of the houses in that neighbourhood.
The exist in the famous London A-Z as well, so presumably they exist in all street maps from that company.
They freely admit that they do it - to the point where they actually admitted and demonstrated the practice on a recent BBC documentary on the famous A-Z (can’t remember it’s name, but it was presented by that bloke who does all the Walking Round Britain type programmes)