Trap street

Last updated
An atlas being used Atlas - book.jpg
An atlas being used

In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential plagiarists of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map as innocent. On maps that are not of streets, other "trap" features (such as nonexistent towns, or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose. [1]

Contents

Trap streets are often nonexistent streets, but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map will misrepresent the nature of a street in a fashion that can still be used to detect copyright violators but is less likely to interfere with navigation. For instance, a map might add nonexistent bends to a street, or depict a major street as a narrow lane, without changing its location or its connections to other streets, or the trap street might be placed in an obscure location of a map that is unlikely to be referenced.

Trap streets are rarely acknowledged by publishers. One exception is a popular driver's atlas for the city of Athens, Greece, which has a warning inside its front cover that potential copyright violators should beware of trap streets. [2]

Trap streets are not copyrightable under the federal law of the United States. In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co. (1992), [3] [4] a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated." (Id. at 733)

In a 2001 case, The Automobile Association in the United Kingdom agreed to settle a case for £20,000,000 when it was caught copying Ordnance Survey maps. In this case, the identifying "fingerprints" were not deliberate errors but rather stylistic features such as the width of roads. [5]

In another case, the Singapore Land Authority sued Virtual Map, an online publisher of maps, for infringing on its copyright. The Singapore Land Authority stated in its case that there were deliberate errors in maps they had provided to Virtual Map years earlier. Virtual Map denied this and insisted that it had done its own cartography. [6]

Cultural references

The 1979 science fiction novel The Ultimate Enemy by Fred Saberhagen includes the short story "The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron" in which a salesman allows a draft of a new Encyclopedia Galactica to be captured by alien war machines. It leads them to believe there is a nearby planet ripe for attack, but the planet is actually a copyright trap and the aliens are led away from inhabited worlds, saving millions of lives.

The 2010 novel Kraken by China Miéville features the trap streets of the London A-Z being places where the magical denizens of the city can exist without risk of being disturbed by normal folk.

A 2013 film, Trap Street , inverts the usual meaning of a trap street, becoming a real street which is deliberately obscured or removed from a map—and anyone who attempts to identify it by placing it on public record is then "trapped". [7]

The 2015 Doctor Who episode "Face the Raven" features a hidden street where alien asylum seekers have taken shelter. Due to a psychic field that subconsciously makes observers ignore it, outsiders consider it a trap street when they see it on maps. One scene involves the character Clara Oswald discussing the definition of "trap street". The episode's working title was also "Trap Street".

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cartography</span> Study and practice of making maps

Cartography is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.

Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.

A canary trap is a method for exposing an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked. It could be one false statement, to see whether sensitive information gets out to other people as well. Special attention is paid to the quality of the prose of the unique language, in the hopes that the suspect will repeat it verbatim in the leak, thereby identifying the version of the document.

Fictitious or fake entries are deliberately incorrect entries in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, and directories, added by the editors as copyright traps to reveal subsequent plagiarism or copyright infringement. There are more specific terms for particular kinds of fictitious entry, such as Mountweazel, trap street, paper town, phantom settlement, and nihilartikel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fictitious persons disclaimer</span> Statement that the persons portrayed in a work of media are not based on real people

An fictitiouspersons disclaimer in a work of media states that the persons portrayed in it are not based on real people. This is done mostly on realistic films and television programs to reduce the possibility of legal action for libel from any person who believes that they have been defamed by their portrayal in the work, whether portrayed under their real name or a different name. The wording of this disclaimer varies, and differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, as does its legal effectiveness.

Jay Robert Nash was an American author of more than 80 true crime books once called the "world's foremost encyclopedist of crime." Among Nash's crime anthologies are Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen and Outlaws, Look For the Woman, Bloodletters and Badmen, and The Great Pictorial History of World Crime. He also compiled his exhaustive research of criminal behaviour into a CD-ROM entitled Jay Robert Nash's True Crime Database.

Hagstrom Map, based in Maspeth, Queens, was the best-selling brand of road maps in the New York City metropolitan area from the mid-20th to early 21st century. The New York Times in 2002 described Hagstrom's Five Borough Atlas as New York City's "map of record" for the previous 60 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agloe, New York</span> Fictional place in New York state, USA

Agloe was originally a fictional hamlet in Colchester, Delaware County, New York, United States, that became an actual landmark after mapmakers made up the community as a phantom settlement, an example of a fictitious entry similar to a trap street, added to the map to catch plagiarism.

Streetdirectory.com is an online web mapping service, founded by Singapore-headquartered Virtual Map in 2000. It originally used licensed data from Singapore Land Authority under a non-exclusive agreement until July 2004. On top of providing free maps for personal use, the website also offers a variety of ad-supported services. The website has since expanded to include maps in Malaysia and Indonesia.

File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia, program files, documents or electronic books/magazines. It involves various legal aspects as it is often used to exchange data that is copyrighted or licensed.

Copyscape is an online plagiarism detection service that checks whether similar text content appears elsewhere on the web. It was launched in 2004 by Indigo Stream Technologies, Ltd.

Universal Publishers produce the ubiquitous UBD-Gregory's street directories in Australia. The names of these publications have come to be used as a generic term for street directories in many Australian cities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intellectual property infringement</span> Illegally breaching a monopoly on an idea

An intellectual property (IP) infringement is the infringement or violation of an intellectual property right. There are several types of intellectual property rights, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks, industrial designs, plant breeders rights and trade secrets. Therefore, an intellectual property infringement may for instance be one of the following:

The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1929, are in the public domain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer cartography</span> Compiling data to create a visual image

Computer cartography is the art, science, and technology of making and using maps with a computer. This technology represents a paradigm shift in how maps are produced, but is still fundamentally a subset of traditional cartography. The primary function of this technology is to produce maps, including creation of accurate representations of a particular area such as, detailing major road arteries and other points of interest for navigation, and in the creation of thematic maps. Computer cartography is one of the main functions of geographic information systems (GIS), however, GIS is not necessary to facilitate computer cartography and has functions beyond just making maps. The first peer-reviewed publications on using computers to help in the cartographic process predate the introduction of full GIS by several years.

In copyright law, the legal status of hyperlinking and that of framing concern how courts address two different but related Web technologies. In large part, the legal issues concern use of these technologies to create or facilitate public access to proprietary media content — such as portions of commercial websites. When hyperlinking and framing have the effect of distributing, and creating routes for the distribution of content (information) that does not come from the proprietors of the Web pages affected by these practices, the proprietors often seek the aid of courts to suppress the conduct, particularly when the effect of the conduct is to disrupt or circumvent the proprietors' mechanisms for receiving financial compensation.

<i>Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.</i> U.S. District Court copyright case

Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F.3d 1126, is a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, holding that copyright owners must consider fair use defenses and good faith activities by alleged copyright infringers before issuing takedown notices for content posted on the Internet.

<i>Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds</i>

Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds, 911 F.2d 970 is an appeal filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Initially, Lasercomb filed an action against Holiday Steel for breach of contract, copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, fraud, unfair competition, and false designation of origin. The United States District Court ruled in favor of Lasercomb, awarding them punitive damages and actual damages for fraud, rejecting the defense of copyright misuse. On appeal, based on a recognition of the similarity to patent misuse, the holding was reversed, deeming the language contained in the license agreement unreasonable.

It is an infringement in Canadian copyright law for any person to do, without the consent of the owner of the copyright, anything that only the copyright owner has a right to do as covered in the Copyright Act.

References

  1. ↑ Cecil Adams. Do maps have 'copyright traps' to permit detection of unauthorized copies? The Straight Dope, August 16, 1991.
  2. ↑ "Αττική" Greek-language map book published by Nik. & Ioan Fotis O.E. [ clarification needed ] (Νικ. & Ιωάν. Φωτής Ο.Ε. [ clarification needed ], http://www.fotismaps.gr Archived 2012-11-07 at the Wayback Machine ), Greek-language warning inside front cover
  3. ↑ 796 F.Supp. 729, E.D.N.Y., 1992
  4. ↑ "Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co". leagle.com. Retrieved 2015-11-14.
  5. ↑ Clark, Andrew (2001-03-06). "Copying maps costs AA £20m". The Guardian . Retrieved 2007-09-24.
  6. ↑ Hin, Peh Aik. "Virtual Map (Singapore) Pte Ltd v Singapore Land Authority and another application[2009] 2 SLR(R) 558; [2009] SGCA 2". www.singaporelaw.sg. Archived from the original on 2015-09-24.
  7. ↑ Chang, Justin (2013-09-06). "Venice Film Review: 'Trap Street'". Variety . Retrieved 2014-05-11.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.