
Trap Rooms: Deliberate errors to catch copyright infringement - cwan
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/trap-rooms.html
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freejoe76
Related: MapQuest is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. It used to be that if
you searched Google Maps for MapQuest, it would point you to the wrong
location.... which gave MapQuest a good idea of which MapQuest job candidates
used Google for directions to their place.

~~~
danilocampos
I wonder how much this counted against an applicant.

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.

~~~
jpcosta
But it would demonstrate a homework well done and a genuine interest in the
company.

~~~
danilocampos
Eh. It would demonstrate obedience.

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.

~~~
blasdel
The problem is that they can't change the UI model without pissing off their
existing userbase that likes clicking cardinal arrows to shift the map tiles
around. Google's never going to implement that interface, even their nojs
interface uses a different UI model.

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.

~~~
danilocampos
OP suggested this was happening back in the day. Either way:

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.

~~~
WalterBright
I stopped using MapQuest because I got tired of the errors in it - locations
were often a mile or more away from where MapQuest said they were, leaving me
driving around in circles.

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brendoncrawford
According to Wikipedia, trap streets are not copyrightable:

 _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)_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street#Legal_issues>

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morisy
I was just talking to an old school journalist last night about the same
topic. A perhaps apocryphal story (it's not on Google, so it can't be _true_ ,
can it?) but good nonetheless:

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.

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karzeem
Neat, this is like a reverse shibboleth.

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.

~~~
jsm386
I wouldn't call it getting busted. The court held that they were allowed to
copy the data, overturning the sweat of the brow doctrine:

 _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. _

~~~
randallsquared
The phrase "got busted" can mean merely "was discovered".

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
This is a term that can lead to mis-communication. Most of the context I know
the term "got busted" implies punishment. The exact usage and implications
vary from place to place, often varying by very large amounts, so care is
required in the usage of such informal terms.

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nostromo
> it's actually there for copyright protection

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.

~~~
eli
A map isn't an abstract collection of facts -- it's a picture drawn by a team
of cartographers. You can definitely copyright that picture.

~~~
nostromo
Correct. You can't just photocopy the map, but you can recreate it.

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.

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protomyth
This type of thing shows up in a lot of fiction books (always as an original
idea). Check "Patriot Games" for an example.

~~~
billswift
The "Canary Trap". I don't remember the original source, but there was a real
world version that Bruce Schneier linked to some months ago.

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dctoedt
Apple took advantage of this in its lawsuit against Apple II cloner Franklin
Computer. Franklin claimed it had independently developed its ROM and OS code.
On examining Franklin's code, Apple found some no-op string variables
containing, e.g., the name of an Apple developer and "Appleworks." See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp).

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timruffles
I can't really resist saying, because it's such a coincidence, that I _live_
in this picture and walk up Lavender Sweep. The trap street wasn't there in
Google maps last time I looked, I assume they must move them around.

