Sorry I don’t have a link on this, but the San Francisco official Municipal Railway map used to show a copyright trap called “Geek St.” that was two blocks away from my apartment. This was in the early-mid 90’s.

I saw one edition of this show, the Map Man, on BBC2 a few weeks back.

They showed the A-Z Map company, the main publisher of London street atlases, at work on a copyright trap. Apparently, the technique they use is that where new streets or developments are under construction, but as yet unnamed, they give them a holding name that also acts as a copyright trap. Then, when the official name came through, they put it in. The amount of development in London means there are always a few traps scattered around the map, without it ever being actually inaccurate.

Clever, I thought.

A web search for the (american?) expression “trap streets” turns up quite a few articles on this. There was a story in the Australian news a few years back about UBD using them (UBD, Gregory’s and Ausways are competitors in Melbourne and Sydney for the same market as AtoZ in London). UBD got some bad press for 24 hours, and then it was forgotten.

“They told us every map had a couple of errors in it because of copyright … they put in a park where there wasn’t one, or a dead-end road. They said that was the practice and we had to live with it.”

See “Nightmare on Bogus Street: a work of fiction in your glovebox” in The Sydney Morning Herald for 95 pence, or a copy in someone’s mailing list archive.

I’ve also heard of trap words in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, although that article doesn’t actually use the phrase.

According to the makers of the San Francisco Muni Map, there are at least three fake streets on their base map. (In cartography classes we always called them ‘hooks’—my teacher was Duncan Fichet who headed the cartography department for RRDonnelly Printing for a couple decades and who helped found the International Cartographic Association.) I’ve found two of them. You can see Geek Street (in the middle) and Moe Street (in the top left). I forget what the other one is.

There are at least two articles on SFGate.com about fake streets on the San Francisco Muni Map. One calls them “bunnies” (after the drawings from the 1930s where you were supposed to find a bunny hidden in the penwork of a bush or tree), while the other just mentions them in passing.

Mark Monmonier’s article “Map Traps” in the July/August 2001 Mercator’s World discusses a US Supreme Court case, Feist v. Rural Telephone Co. (1991) that, more or less, ended the “legal clout” of map traps (at least in the US). In essence, the ruling said that copyright cannot be used to protect “collections of facts.” However, copyright does protect a particular original representation of those facts. Thus you can retrace (create a new representation of) a map (the facts) and not infringe on copyright, but you cannot reproduce (say a digital scan) the original map without infringing on copyright. Of course, this is complicated and various strategies can be engaged to protect maps and mapped data (see also Monmonier’s article “Originality Bites” Sept/Oct 2001 Mercator’s World). More info, from an older source, can be found at the “Proceedings Of The Conference On Law And Information Policy For Spatial Databases”, particularly the article by William Holland”

http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/tempe/tempe94.html

John K.

Copyright traps are of limited, if any, use as a result of court decisions over the past 15 years. There is relatively little a map publisher can protect beyond the photographic reproduction of a map. Facts are not protectible and the former protections based on selection and arrangement of facts, I’m told, are either weaker or no longer recognized. So a fake street will tell a publisher that someone else has used his map as a source, but that doesn’t buy you anything.

I would argue that maps are representations of reality and are never wholly accurate. They therefore contain errors.

Secondly, there is no metadata on the planet earth that ‘most accurately’ represents any given set of spatial data, and, there are no laws requiring the use of metadata. Therefore, without associated metadata, how can one claim copyright?

My point is simply - maps are not only representations, they are - ‘opinions’.