Such fictitious places appear in all derived (and original) maps, and is not by itself an indication of ripping off - it's only used as evidence when someone claims that their map is not copied. It will also show up for everyone who has legitimately acquired the map data.
In particulal, the original article mentions an acquisition path how most likely that map has made it's way legally to google.
Well, the whole thing's kinda meta, isn't it? The content isn't on either site, it's just, really, the content identifiers. Not even that, this is about a sorting of identifiers against arbitrary strings of text. Whatever distinctions we have here are gonna appear incredibly small (and petty), but it's really the bread and butter of search.
Both are map makers in a sense, providing guides to what they didn't create, but still spent plenty of effort to make that guide. In the literal, map-making world, the artifact is the printed map. In that world, the way to check for copyright infringement is to see if mapping errors are duplicated as well.
The presumption being that if the errors were copied, then so was the good data.
Short-term, the benefit was that users would get discounts on high-quality data, as they only had to pay for the efforts of the map-copy, not the original map data acquisition. Of course, then you're just waiting for the quality to drop, as there's less and less incentive to actually do the map-making work. The margins go down, and the original sources have to update their maps less often to keep their costs low enough to be competitive.
There isn't a printed page with web search; the product is the output of a continuously-running dataset & algorithm.
But, I'm gonna ask, in the web-search world, how do you define copying and how do you test for it? If you don't think there is a valid definition, please don't count yourself the same as the group who thinks that there is a valid definition and this isn't it. They're two separate things.
(I've framed the question how I see it, and I work for Google, but I'm obviously no official speaker -- I've only been here a few months, and don't work in search quality. This is (almost definitionally) a fanboi war of sorts, and I wanted to stay out. I probably should have :( )
The point of the "fake streets" on maps is to prove that the rival map maker copied data rather than driving all the roads themselves. Here, there is no doubt that the data in question is originally sourced from Craigslist. There is no need to prove it.
I read an article about that a while ago. Apparently map makers were inserting fake towns into their maps to see if their maps had been wrongfully copied.
Reminds me of how mapmakers will include fake locations so that they can catch others who simply copy their map (not sure if this is still a thing or just happened back in the day)
Map makers do sometimes put fake things (like little roads) that don't exist on their maps, to hopefully be able to spot third parties copying their data to make and sell their own maps.
Most maps are deliberately inaccurate in subtle ways. You can't copyright facts, so cartographers use fictional places and deliberate errors to protect their work. If these features appear on another map, then it's reasonable to assume that they were plagiarised. Historically, cartographers have often created settlements or roads where none actually exist; inventing fictional names for districts or mis-spelling some place names may be a safer option in the age of GPS and autonomous cars.
They probably haven't and even if they have there's probably some other bogus data in there.
A lot of these maps will have a couple 'tells' added, things that don't really exist to say that if a set of things was copied it came from a different place.
Really sucks when you happen to need to go somewhere you haven't been before, that's actually where that place is next to. Yes, that does happen. E.G. when relatives and friends live on private roads in the middle of nowhere.
Reminds me of the strategy of map companies, that planted tiny errors or fictional streets in their maps, so that they can identify other map companies, that copied their work.
>In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential plagiarists of the map
> Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
Looks like a safe (and fun) way to introduce fictitious entries [1] while hinting the careful map reader that there's something fishy on the map. Wrong map data on maps can be dangerous after all, especially in a landscape like the alps.
Exactly. This should definitely be grounds for allowing copying google maps data as long as you render it in your own style. The usual trick here is trap data where map makers insert fake data to catch copies but thats exactly what happened here with the ' in the lyrics.
Don't some map makers put ghost towns or roads that don't actually exist in their own maps as a sort of fingerprinting method? Unless you actually visit that particular spot, one might not know and inadvertently copy the proprietary map data,
In particulal, the original article mentions an acquisition path how most likely that map has made it's way legally to google.
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