I ran into a guy last summer who works for a digital map company, and he said they still do the trap thing. Sometimes it's a fictitious place, sometimes an intentional missspelling, he described a number of other tricks that I no longer recall. I guess there's enough "borrowing" going on that it's worth their while to intentionally deceive in defense of their intellectual property rights.
This reminded me of an occurrence about 50 years ago with the "official" state highway map. Picture two tiny towns only three miles apart. One has four times the population and activity of the other at that time. Guess which one magically disappeared from that year's state highway map. The local uproar and good-natured ribbing continued until the map produced the following year showed both tiny towns existing.
So if the map claims to represent facts and one can't own the copyright on facts then could the map publisher be estopped from claiming a copyright on a false town which the map represents as real?
Mule Barn, Ok
..is probably a good example.
A close friend grew up just two miles from there. Never heard of it. Nothing there, never has been. No history, no mention hardly anywhere except Google Earth and Wikipedia.
Rod Serling called, he wants his map back.
> So if the map claims to represent facts and one can't own the copyright on facts then could the map publisher be estopped from claiming a copyright on a false town which the map represents as real?
I assume that the traps aren't intended to protect facts, but rather the creative expression of facts. Absent a unique identifier (e.g. a trap), it'd be harder to prove that the copyright holder's intellectual property was copied rather than independently produced.
Mule Barn, Ok
I like that it has zero area, and all of it is land.
Henry
Nebraska and South Dakota still have many places on the current highway maps that appear to be towns, but there is nothing more than a single residence or an abandoned house there. Often not even a sign on the road.
