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.
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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. However, 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 the case with £20m because it was caught copying the plaintiff's maps including the traps, or carefully planted "fingerprints".
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 field 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.
See also
- Honeytoken
- Nihilartikel (see the Motivations section)
External links
- Do maps have "copyright traps" to permit detection of unauthorized copies? (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_165.html) by The Straight Dope
- Copying maps costs AA £20m: "Fingerprints" in Ordnance Survey sources used as proof (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,447171,00.html) by Andrew Clark, The Guardian,