Trap Street
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
> Trap streets are not copyrightable under the federal law of the United States. In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co. (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."
Trap Street - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17738847 - Aug 2018 (21 comments)
Trap street - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992748 - Jan 2013 (22 comments)
South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818584 - Nov 2012 (46 comments)
Not a Word: The story of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504126 - July 2010 (10 comments)
There are many map arcana tales, yet another reason for "trap streets" - fake data infill, is to realistically fill voids left by top secret classified national security areas.
The UK Ordnance Survey famously produced rich detailed maps across all of the United Kingdom .. save for blank voids over naval shipyards, weapons testing, secret nuclear bunkers, etc . . .
Eventually somebody cottoned onto the reason these voided areas became magnets for Russian agents - nothing signified something of great interest.
The US/UK BMEWS station at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire used to be omitted from OS maps. Utterly pointless as there were three huge 40m+ high radomes on the site, which was next to a main road.
It was already on the map, so he figured that it might as well actually exist.
But you don't want people to copy it, so you fill it full of garbage.
It's a bit like Walmart adding a little bit of sewage to their consumer goods so people are less likely to shoplift. Don't worry, the baby formula only has 3 grams of human fecal matter in it!
It is even worse in the age of Digital Rights Management were you buy something and do not own it. A fake detour in a map with hundreds of thousands seems mild in comparison.
> In August 2005, The New Oxford American Dictionary gained media coverage when it was leaked that the second edition contained at least one fictional entry. This later was determined to be the word "esquivalience", defined as "the wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities", which had been added to the edition published in 2001. It was intended as a copyright trap, as the text of the book was distributed electronically and thus very easy to copy.
Edit: okay, downvote me, but English is absurd sometimes. Imagine trying to teach a person who doesn't know English at all, from first principles, the extreme difference between a trap street and a trap house in common USA slang vernacular.