With all the time and  energy cartographers spend preparing maps, it makes sense that they would want to protect their investment. One of the ways the

Copyrighting Cartography with Fictional Places

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2021-07-23 20:00:08

With all the time and energy cartographers spend preparing maps, it makes sense that they would want to protect their investment. One of the ways they do so — although they don’t always admit it — is by including “trap streets,” deliberate mistakes added to maps to catch unsuspecting copyright violators. These may include fake streets, as the name suggests, but the term is also applied to other  erroneous cartographic data included to embarrass those who might steal it. Usually, these “mistakes” are minor: tiny (and entirely false) bends in rivers and roads, or slightly altered mountain elevations. 

The TeleAtlas Directory, the basis for Google Maps, is said to have included several trap streets. According to a 2012 article in Cabinet, Moat Lane once curved its way through North London, at least in the regular view of on Google Maps, although the satellite layer revealed that the place where the lane was supposed to exist was a disparate collection of trees and houses — there was no lane there at all. 

Other TeleAtlas/Google Maps trap streets have included Oxygen Street, which supposedly ran between two houses in Edinburgh (it didn’t), Adolph-Menzel-Ring and Otto-Dix-Ring, both attached to Wiesenstrasse in Zeuthen, Germany (they weren’t), and Kerbela Street, which purportedly ran through the Shropshire Learners & Driving Instructor Training Center in Shrewsbury, England (it never existed). 

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