>In Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Andrew H. Amsterdam dba Franklin Maps, the court ruled that "fictitious names may not be copyrighted" and "the existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact".
Maps are copyrightable (I think?), but the trap streets themselves aren't. They're only there to detect when someone is copying the map.
Heh, I actually learned about trap streets when talking to a cartographer who made the muni map of SF you find at all the bus stops (much like this one: http://www.mobilemaplets.com/thumbnails/261_thumbnail-1024.j...). He told me he added a small alleyway in the map named after his family that doesn't actually exist, and they catch people violating their copyright all the time with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street#Legal_issues
>In Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Andrew H. Amsterdam dba Franklin Maps, the court ruled that "fictitious names may not be copyrighted" and "the existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact".
Maps are copyrightable (I think?), but the trap streets themselves aren't. They're only there to detect when someone is copying the map.