Trap street
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A trap street is a fictitious street included on a map, often outside the area the map covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map.
[edit] Legal issues
In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., 796 F.Supp. 729, E.D.N.Y., 1992, a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. These traps may still be useful in other countries. Even if the trap cannot be used in a court, it still helps a business owner to detect other people's misconduct.
In a 2001 case of the United Kingdom, a defendant agreed to settle a case for £20m when it was caught copying the plaintiff's maps. In this case, the identifying "fingerprints" were not deliberate errors but rather stylistic features such as the width of roads.
[edit] Traveller's woes
Occasionally people following these maps will become trapped when they attempt to follow them. There is an urban legend that a young tourist couple in Los Angeles attempted to take a short cut shown on their map, but instead wound up stuck in the middle of a feud between two rival street gangs and were killed. Generally though, trap streets are dead-ends rather than through streets.
Sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map will instead misrepresent the nature of a street in some 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 laneway, without changing its location or its connections to other streets.
Trap streets are routinely denied or rarely acknowledged by publishers. This is not always the case, however. A popular driver's atlas for the city of Athens, Greece warns on its inside front cover that potential copyright violators should beware of trap streets[1].
In an edition of the BBC Two programme Map Man, first broadcast 17 October 2005, a spokesman for the Geographer's A-Z Street Atlas company claimed that there are "about 100" trap streets included in the London edition of the A-Z Street Atlas. One such street, "Bartlett Place", a genuine but misnamed pedestrian walkway, was exposed on the programme, and as a result will appear in future editions under its real name, Broadway Walk.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Αττική" Greek-language map book published by Nik. & Ioan Fotis O.E. (Νικ. & Ιωάν. Φωτής Ο.Ε., http://www.fotismaps.gr), Greek-language warning inside front cover
