Live London Underground / bus maps taken down by TfL trademark complaint
traintimes.org.uk
traintimes.org.uk
If you think you have a case about the map, why not state it explicitly? The cynical answer is that ISPs have incentives not to care so making a case doesn't matter but ...
[1] https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/email2.txt [2] One can look them up in https://www.tmdn.org/tmview [3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1125
To remove the whole site because of that seems petty.
It was clearly stated in their api documentation. It’s no different than getting a license or usage rights for hosting an image or video on your site. Just because you are a hobbyist doesn’t mean you don’t have to follow the rules.
This is coming from someone who is extremely pro fair-use and right to ownership.
don't you think?
How is the trademark holder supposed to know who they are dealing with? Because they said so? Well, in that case I know a Nigerian prince who would like to send you some money…
In a similar vein, the lawyers of the popular "hook and loop fasteners" Velcro constantly try and defend their IP so it doesn't become generic.
The TFL tube map is almost 100 years old[0] and while we can argue if industrial design is "art" the main point of the tube map is utilitarian - to help people navigate the underground.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00087041.2021.1...
Whatever the term of copyright should be, there’s no doubt that it was a significant endeavour to create it, and it creatively expresses the topography of London.
Your analogy doesn’t work very well I’m afraid. The Mercator projection is 500 years old, and generally speaking, you can only copyright specific works, not processes. If you want to protect a process from being used by others commercially, you need a patent, and generally patents are not as long lived as copyright.
Regardless of how much effort a copyrighted work to produce, most Western countries have a fair-use equivalent to transformative use of a work: https://lawdit.co.uk/readingroom/intellectual-property-law-g....
In the case of "utility" works like maps, charts, diagrams, there is already ample motivation to create them – people want to be able to navigate, scientists want others to understand their data, etc.
But is suppose many organisations just don't give people the autonomy and authority to do such tings.
1. The map is covered by copyright.
2. The only way to get a license is to buy one from their map partner.
> We protect the map under copyright and officially license it for brands and businesses to reproduce it.
> To use the map in your design, you must have the permission of our map licensing partner, Pindar Creative. This is the only way to officially license the map, no matter how you'd like to use it.
Yet, they don't even mention the case you might be a third-party developer providing a non-profit service.
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-advertisers/map-lic...
> For registered charities and schools, the licence is royalty free, but we still charge an artwork fee of £352 + VAT
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-advertisers/using-t...
Institution funded by taxpayers charging institutions funded by donors and taxpayers. Be nice if there were any value being added, rather than just exchanged.
I violated my own rule of always re-reading a post 5 min after posting it...
The site was taken down by a trademark complaint, not a copyright complaint.
My wife is an IP attorney at a large UK based law firm. We have discussed this exact thing before (in this thread).
She worked on a client matter for a banking app that wanted to show the logo of each company next to the transaction. This was not cleared by legal given that the law only allows for the bare minimum reference.
I think it's dumb because a logo is faster to see in a list vs. text, but it doesn't matter. I think IP laws are so backwards in the modern era, but thems the rules.
Apple Maps also uses the logos when you bring up location details.
But all the creator had to do was to remove logos and possibly change the name so there would be no confusion around whether this was an official project or not.
And it seems like the geographic map was fine, only the schematic map would have been an issue because its design is presumably specifically copyrighted and yes you would have to license that just like any other map.
The letters he received may have been heavy-handed but there's nothing wrong with the general principle of it.
It would seem that nobody bothered to run the notice past a lawyer.
How have they removed the whole site? It literally says "My traintimes.org.uk is still there." at the bottom of the page. Looks like only the maps have been removed.
(Edited to add: I'm a long time traintimes.org.uk user who never even realised they had maps on the site, so consequently I am happy the whole site has not been taken down)
The second email sent an hour later requesting the hosting provider immediately suspend the entire domain was not.
Maybe, but TFA explains that it's not being petty, just lack of time and resources.
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-advertisers/map-lic...
Amusingly the notice was sent with references to USA trademark law.
I am not sure how it works with regional governments, but copyright information for government-produced works tends to live as a "crown copyright" in the UK and former colonies.
I think Harry Beck would think history was repeating itself
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-advertising-annual-report-202...
That seems very little to be honest. Who is licensing what from the London Metro?
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/business-and-advertisers/contact...
There is no way they are running a licensing department for under £200kpa.
What is controversial about this?
In the United States, government works like this would be public domain.
You're judging the copyright enforcement action by itself in a void, but it's not in a void.
Except it's actually trademark? It's ridiculous to apply trademark law here. No consumer confusion is happening.
Why not? Mind you I'm not saying any tube map, but the official TfL one.
> Sorry, something's gone wrong We have a technical problem right now. One of the following options might help you:
It's perfect
Compare to National Rail that has a pointless loading page, uses the entire initial viewport to show anything but the train times, and search is weirdly stateful. Just terrible all round
Thanks Matthew
But now, the headwinds apparently have changed. Sad :(
They still do but not the branding:
"Use our data - not our brand" https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/design-and-brand...
Regardless of whether the map is capable of being protected by IP law (TfL certainly seem to think it is), this just feels stingy and pointless on TfL's part. They are a public service after all, and these maps arguably furthered their public mission. Given how popular the map is I would much prefer they published it under a licence allowing free non-commercial use with attribution (including a statement that the user is not affiliated with TfL).
Strange enough the owner also seems to have removed the OpenStreetMap-based live train maps. Those can't be copyrighted?
You should take that leak with a huge grain of salt because the alleged list of apps stealing your location contains hundreds of apps that doesn't even contain location permissions.
I might have been caught lying before about these things but this time it’s different.
I trust a leak from someone with no financial gain from the leak.
I do not trust multi nationals worth several million, billion, trillion, to state truth. I expect them to lie until caught by a federal entity and fined.
Guess how many times multi nationals lied to the public last year alone.
Now you answer: “Why do you put any trust in what statements a corp releases?!”
>I do not trust multi nationals worth several million, billion, trillion, to state truth. I expect them to lie until caught by a federal entity and fined.
>Guess how many times multi nationals lied to the public last year alone.
And what about the leak itself? "You really think someone would do that, just go on the internet and tell lies?"
Here's an anonymous "leak" I found that says whatsapp is backdoored and sends your chats to the CCP: https://pastebin.com/uE4m694M . Are you going to believe it? If asked for comment, Meta is probably going to deny it, but obviously they're going to be lying for the reasons you mentioned.
>Now you answer: “Why do you put any trust in what statements a corp releases?!”
"Trust" isn't binary, it's a spectrum. I don't put much trust in corp releases, but I still trust them far more than an unverified source. Even if you put zero weight on "statements a corp releases", you can inspect the AOSP source code yourself and see that it shouldn't be possible for apps to steal your location data when it doesn't have location permissions, and therefore a list claiming that such apps are stealing your location data should be treated with extreme skepticism.
Less incentives to lie.
Edit: I had a think, and what I picked up on was the idea that sheer concentration of money might stand in as a signal for trust, and so whether somone with more money would naturally be more honest or dishonest than someone with less, is really more of an interesting question.
As far as I understand, this is a list of locations and apps used by a person, but without much context. A typical response to this has been something like this:
> Grindr has never worked with or provided data to Gravy Analytics. We do not share data with data aggregators or brokers and have not shared geolocation with ad partners for many years. Transparency is at the core of our privacy program, therefore the third parties and service providers we work with are listed here on our website.
Note how carefully written this is to imply they don’t share any data at all, but they stop short of saying “we don’t share any data with ad partners”, just geolocation data.
But for companies like Gravy, their whole business is about getting data.
So it’s not at all implausible (or even unlikely) that this represents an event where a user opened Grindr (conceivably sold to Gravy by one of Grindr’s ad partners following an impression), and the same individual’s location was determined by some other method (for example, IP address geolookup, or bought from a company which IS supplying data to Gravy directly and has location permissions).
Take the leak with a grain of salt, sure, but it’s looking reasonably genuine to me.
Mobile operating systems don't have good (if any) support for opening things in subprocesses with restricted permissions from the rest of the app. So if Grindr loads an ad, that ad runs with Grindr's permissions. Same for any analytics code that ad uses. So if Grindr gets geolocation, even temporarily, so does every ad partner they have, whether they like it or not.
And the thing is, ads are a bottomless pit of third-party JavaScript. Nobody trusts nobody in the ad space, so everyone wants their own trackers doing their own client-side data collection. So Grindr doesn't have to know anything about Gravy Analytics, they just have to have an ad partner decide to use them and bam, they're compromised.
>And the thing is, ads are a bottomless pit of third-party JavaScript. [...]
If it's actually javascript, attempting to grab location would result in a weird location prompt[1] that shows even if you granted the app location permission. It's still conceivable for a random SDK to go rogue and exfiltrate location data, but it's unlikely that an ad in a webview would be able to.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39665367/how-to-prevent-...
There's a pretty big difference between "grindr sells your inferred information from IP" and "citymapper sold your location data". Even though the latter technically could be limited to the former, it's pretty obvious that most people think it's selling your precise location as determined by GPS or whatever. Just look at the other replies to my comments if you don't believe me. This is important, because not all "location data" is the same. People are far more likely to be creeped out by precise location data than ip location data, and you're basically constantly transmitting the latter every time you use any app/website.
I can see how it sort of happened though. TfL makes money from licensing The roundels and other ephemera are popular. From tourists buying licensed souvenirs, and other transport authorities licensing the signage system in use in their own regions, that is used to invest in the system as a whole (worth noting: TfL is not a private entity, it's non-profit making, everything it makes goes back into investment).
Because of that popularity there are a lot of people who try and rip off the TfL brand and trademarks. Lots of tourist souvenir shops might be minded to get their own take on this material, and have some cheaply made and expensively sold to tourists, for example. Another transport authority might skip the millions invested in thinking about how to communicate clearly, and just "lift" TfL's thinking. That obviously isn't fair, if you think IP law is able to be fair in any way.
So, yeah, there are people whose job it is to protect that revenue and protect the trademarked and copyright material that protect that revenue.
But this is a hobbyist having fun. I don't think anybody thought that this was a service provided by TfL, and I can't expect he was making much of a living from it, or depriving TfL of revenue.
It's really rather tragically sad that we're now in a World where good intentions on all sides can't really see each other. There is so much utter penny-and-dime theft and copyright infringing shit on the internet that requires constant purging by people who are expected to protect their own trademarks, that the assumption now is everybody is trying to make money off everyone else, and nobody wants to do any actual original work any more.
I hope someone at TfL sees the light and comes up with a better license for use of their assets, and sees this for what it is, and reverses the decision. I doubt that'll happen, though. :(
I imagine they'd love to if they weren't constantly shafted by Government Du Jour when it comes to funding.
They probably do not like the way they are treated by having their artwork/maps/trademarks taken without permission when they might well offer it for free for good causes / hobbyists.
I'm guessing there is some copyright notice they require too in the license to protect themselves.
I don't know if they do or not, but just pointing out the hypocrisy.
Seems the OP would rather keep their site down than ask so i guess we won't know.