Getting Lost, Even With a Map

If you travel as much as I do then you would know what it is like to not know where you're going. I'll be honest, I don't know every street of every Australian city's CBD by heart, so I, like so many other people, am left relying on the quality of maps. I use the Google Maps Mobile app on my iPhone to get about on foot, but it doesn't matter what you're using—another map app on a mobile device, a GPS receiver or even the trusty old referdex is nothing worse than turning a corner only to discover that street/alleyway/walkway/overpass/building/whatever marked out on your map doesn't actually exist.

For a long time I put these kinds of anomalies down to bad data. Perhaps the item displayed on the map no longer exists because of changes in the built environment? Maybe some cartographic prankster added them in there for kicks? Either way, the likelihood is that the accuracy of the data over time would not be verified since initial inclusion on the map. With the sheer amount and pace of development occurring in the inner-city precincts of many cities, such a situation is understandable. As consumers, we can let these kinds of data lies slide.

But what if that information was intentionally wrong? What if the company that published that map or app had intentionally included a road or a walkway or some other feature that did actually exist? They're called trap streets and they do exist (or don't exist, as it were)! In fact, it is such an issue that even the (in)famous Cecil Adam's Chicago Reader column, The Straight Dope, has covered it. But what brings me to discussing these copyright traps is Geoff Manaugh's recent post about them on BLDGBLOG.

As Manaugh says, these are "deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms."

In-map Easter eggs is one thing, but intentional misinformation included for the purposes of identifying copyright infringement is wholly different. Basically, if you discover that another mapping company has included their your trap streets on their map, you can claim that they've copied your maps and infringed your copyright. Although vehemently denied, a number of commercial mapping companies include trap streets or other trap elements. Even Google (or TeleAtlas at least) have them (although it should be noted that Manaugh's example trap street in Clapham in the United Kingdom that ran from the corner of the intersection of St John's Hill, St John's Road and Lavender Hill to where Altenburg Gardens meets Battersea Rise has been removed from Google Maps).

While Manaugh's musings about how this might play out heading forward into the emerging market for mapping of building interiors seem to be heading more down the sociocultural, psychotic and/or science-fiction paths, my thoughts are more down the line of wondering why my expectation of a reliable map is less important than the drive to ferret out potential copyright infringement? What does this mean for consumers expecting to get a reliable map?

The problem stems from the competitive nature of the free market. If you've spent all the time, effort and money doing the cartography to develop mapping products for the market, you naturally don't want someone else getting all the benefit of that work without the outlay. I get that, but surely there's a way to get competitive products to the market without having to intentionally undermine the integrity of the map? The answer seems to be the availability of high-quality mapping data created in a non-competitive situation that is available for reuse and commercialisation. But who could/would do such a thing? Governments.

Many governments around the world have been creating and publishing maps of their jurisdiction for years, usually through an official mapping agency charged with the task. Here in Australia the role is delegated to Geoscience Australia. These agencies could assert copyright in these mapping products like companies do. It's certainly been done before (to offer but two examples: the UK agency, Ordnance Survey sued the British Automobile Association in 2001 and the Singapore Land Authority sued Virtual Map in 2006). Or they could do like Geoscience Australia, and release their data under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, thereby enabling the data to be utilised in ways that stimulate the economy AND remove the need for intentional non-existent landmarks to be added in!