Trap Rooms: Deliberate errors to catch copyright infringement
bldgblog.blogspot.com
bldgblog.blogspot.com
In every substantial way, Google Maps was simply a better product than MapQuest from day one. Shockingly better. Would it be such an affront that MapQuest applicants should have a sense of taste?
Especially on the road to making their product better, if anything, using Google Maps should've been a bonus in an applicant's favor. Their sense of taste could move the organization forward.
It comes down to this bit of dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin: "If you're stupid, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you."
The Google Maps debut product was so astonishingly good it instantly changed user behavior. You had to use it just once to realize everything that came before was insultingly bad. Immediate loyalty. It was a cataclysmic shift in the space.
So, if it's me, and I'm hiring at MapQuest, and I have IQ that's expressed with at least two digits, I'm in a desperate search for smart people to come help me turn the ship. If they're using the competitor's product, that's fucking awesome. We're going to need as much competitive insight as we can get to make this turd into something people want to use again.
If Mapquest's users wanted GMaps, they'd have switched by now. Aping that would only infuriate them, and since Google will always do a better job of implementing the rich JS interface than Mapquest can, the previously-recalcitrant users would just switch.
MapQuest didn't suck because of its UI model. MapQuest sucked because it was clunky, slow, and cluttered. Its implementation was crap.
When you look at today's MapQuest, they've largely corrected this. The maps are much less ugly, they now pick a (somewhat) reasonable level of detail based on your zoom level and moving around the map is fast whether you're using their joystick control or dragging the map.
The sad thing is, none of this is rocket science. It shouldn't have taken them this long to figure out. Google Maps steadily, inevitably eroded their market share and last I heard, they were 10% behind.
I got the job.
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. There, the court stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright . . . . If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated." (Id. at 733)
Years ago, well before even Murdoch ownership, the NY Post was knicking sports scores from the New York Daily News. Competition being what it was, the Daily News went so far as to not only falsify some scores, but to falsify some schools, making up new institutes of education throughout the 5 boroughs.
I can only imagine the page one headlines once the Post was outed.
This sort of stuff has been around for a while. One of the big Supreme Court rulings on the copyrightability of datasets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) concerned a company that got sued for copying 4000 entries from a competitor's phone book. They got busted because they'd unknowingly copied fake entries.
The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable, and that therefore no infringement existed.
Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow doctrine, which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural.
Not really - you can't copyright facts. IANAL, but if you want to create a map based on another map's information, you're free to do so. Google Feist v. Rural for more info.
iSubwayMaps.com ran into copyright problems with the MTA in New York a while back. Instead of paying the MTA to use their official maps they just recreated the map themselves, using the official map as the only source. This, apparently, doesn't violate copyright law, even though the resulting maps are very similar.
1. When you copy a map, you usually don't make a Xerox (i.e. take the map tiles from Google Maps) -- you trace over it or recreate the underlaying data. Thus you're not copying the representation of the map but the abstract collection of facts that were used to generate the creative picture.
2. Is there any creative work being done when you use automated cartography (i.e. a set of human beings aren't hand-drawing the map based on your data from #1)? In the case of automated cartography I can see the cartographic style data being copyrightable but I don't think the actual tiled image representation of the map data is copyrightable.
Of course, this is all (theoretically) a moot point because the Terms of Use prohibit automated use of Google Maps' data.
If the trap door shows up on your map, you cannot claim that your map is factual. You cannot claim your map is a 100% copy of mine, either, as that would be copyright infringement. IANAL, but I doubt that a judge would rule otherwise.
"O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself."
and
"the standard for creativity is extremely low"
For a map, the creative aspects are way stronger than for a phone directory. Therefore, I still think that copying significant parts of a map would be infringement. Trap doors would help strengthen the case that copying took place.
And that's a good thing. If intentional factual errors were copyrightable, newspapers would fill their articles with misspellings and falsehoods in hopes that they could sue competing publications out of existence.
In the UK and Commonwealth countries the Crown holds full copyright by default over all government works.