paper towns & trap streets

Story
Written By Kimberly Potvin

The art of copyright and mapmaking

I have always found cartography to be a fascinating field. In the early days, most maps came from direct observations of the world, built from measurements, surveys, and sketches, and often from combining and building on the work of others. This kind of documentation was not only expensive but also time-consuming. Before the printing press, and later digital technologies, the map also had to be produced in graphic form through relief, intaglio, or planar printing, then proofed and printed in editions. Technology has changed how maps are made and reproduced many times over, but our fascination with capturing the world around us in visual form has remained the same.

Something else has held true through the history of mapmaking, which is how easy it is to hide secrets inside of a map. Mapmakers, including artists, designers, and publishers, have found creative ways to insert fictitious elements into their work, sometimes for protection and sometimes to make a statement. This is the story of paper towns and trap streets, and of the surprising ways copyright law has become intertwined with these concepts.

good, old Agloe

Somewhere in the Catskills, at a quiet crossroads a few miles from Roscoe, New York, there is a town that was created with copyright in mind. Its name is Agloe, and it is known as a paper town. Paper towns, also called phantom settlements, are fictitious places that mapmakers add to give their maps a unique, identifying feature, often to catch copycats.

Sometime between the 1920s and 1937, Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of the General Drafting Company (“GDC”) combined their initials to form the name Agloe. They used this name at an obscure intersection of two dirt-roads on their map of New York. The goal was to quietly sign their work while protecting a map that they had worked hard to produce. If Agloe ever appeared on a competitor’s map, GDC would know exactly where it came from. Years later, Rand McNally, one of GDC’s biggest competitors, released a map of New York that showed Agloe in the very same location. GDC asserted that their prized work had been copied, but Rand McNally stated that the information came from county records, which showed a real business in that exact location, called the Agloe General Store. And now, the plot twist. The store’s owners had seen Agloe on a GDC map handed out at an Esso gas station, assumed the town was real, and named their business after the name on the map. The location that never existed became a town that did, all because of a map created to catch a copycat.

This story is often told as a dramatic courtroom showdown, although the evidence that a lawsuit was ever filed is thin. It is far more interesting as a circular tale of a place that never existed that then came into being because of copyright. Sadly, the store eventually closed, and Agloe faded back into the imaginary world it came from.

 

Visual 01. The GDC map showing Agloe, New York. Courtesy of the Colchester Historical Society

 

the infamous Beatosu and Goblu

Not every paper town was created for protection. If you look closely at the first printings of Michigan’s official 1978-79 state highway map, you will find two towns in northern Ohio that have never existed, called Beatosu and Goblu. They were less a copyright trap, and funny enough, more a tribute to University of Michigan football.

The idea came from Peter Fletcher, chairman of the Michigan State Highway Commission and a proud University of Michigan alumnus. The state map included a narrow strip of northern Ohio in the frame and Fletcher saw an opportunity to support his favorite football team. He directed a cartographer to add the two towns. Goblu, a nod to the Michigan chant “Go Blue,” was placed near Toledo. Beatosu, short for “Beat OSU,” landed in rural Fulton County. To add to the ribbing, both names were placed in lowercase letters, while every other town on the map was capitalized. The state limited the print run, and later printings of the map left both towns out, which makes the 1978 map a collector’s item today. It is a reminder that paper towns are not always about copyright, but at times, can be a very public expression of rivalry.

MISSING Argleton

A more contemporary happening of a paper town took place in 2008, when a staff member at a university in West Lancashire, England, noticed a town on Google Maps named Argleton. When a colleague later walked to the exact location, he found nothing but open fields without a single building in sight. Over the following year, blog posts and news coverage spread the story, and people began to wonder where this small, fictitious town had come from and why no one could find it in the real world.

Because Argleton existed in Google’s map data, other online services began generating information about the town, including real estate listings, job postings, and weather reports. Each new data point gave the phantom town a little more credibility. Google acknowledged that the data, which came from the mapping provider Tele Atlas, could contain occasional errors, and by 2010, Argleton had disappeared from Google Maps entirely. No one has ever confirmed whether it was a deliberate copyright trap or simply a mistake, perhaps even a garbled version of the nearby parish of Aughton. Either way, Argleton shows how a paper town can take on a digital life of its own long after it may have been removed from the original map.

Deliberate Mistakes

Whether they are described as accidents or intentional actions, many of these fictitious streets and towns share a common purpose. They create a way to identify something that is easy to reproduce and difficult to protect. Over the decades, cartographers have added kinks to rivers, exaggerated the curves of roads, and made subtle changes to geographic coordinates as a way to mark their work. Viewed on its own, a map with these changes looks correct and functions as expected with any oddity appearing like a minor human error. For the owners and creators, though, these small tricks form a pattern that can reveal where a work truly originated.

It is easy to think of maps as factual documents that sit outside copyright, but maps were part of the copyright story from the beginning. The first federal copyright statute, signed by President George Washington in 1790, was titled, An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Securing Copies of Maps, Charts, and Books. One of the first works registered under the new law, only weeks after it passed, was John Churchman’s, An Explanation of the Magnetic Atlas, or Variation Chart. In England, mapmakers relied on royal patents and other privileges to fend off competitors, and when The Statute of Anne came about in 1710, along with a series of Engraving Acts in the eighteenth century, maps and other graphic works came under copyright protection.

Even with these protections in place, a key question remained. How could the law protect works whose entire purpose was to represent facts? Paper towns and trap streets were, in part, the mapmaker’s answer, but an unproven one. If the law failed to reliably protect the work, the mapmaker could at least plant a unique identifier that indicated the original creator of the map. Whether that strategy would hold up in court is where the story gets more interesting.

 

Visual 02. Map from John Churchman’s book, “An Explanation of the Magnetic Atlas, or Variation Chart,” James & Johnson (1790).

Courtesy of Library of Congress (LOC ID 05031395)

 

intertwining Cases

Insights into copyright protection for maps in the United States comes from a case that is not about maps at all. In 1991, in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., a small Kansas telephone company sued a directory publisher for copying its white pages listings. Rural Telephone had included a smattering of fictitious listings in its directory, similar to the concept of a paper town, so it could tell when a competitor may have copied from its work. Four of those fictitious listings appeared in Feist’s directory, and although the trap worked as expected, Rural still lost this case.

The Supreme Court enforced that copyright requires originality, meaning independent creation and a minimal degree of creativity. A compilation of facts “may possess the requisite of originality” through the way those facts are selected, coordinated, and arranged, but Rural’s alphabetical list of names and phone numbers was “devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity,” and no amount of effort, cost, or time spent gathering the information could change that reasoning. Feist had indeed copied, but what it copied did not qualify for copyright. It was simply a listing, based on facts that were easily accessible to anyone.

A year later, the Fifth Circuit addressed the question of originality and creativity in maps in Mason v. Montgomery Data, Inc. Hodge Mason had crated real estate ownership maps of Montgomery County, Texas, and a group of companies had used them in a land-indexing system without his permission. The court held that Mason’s “selection, coordination, and arrangement of the information that he depicted were sufficiently creative to qualify his maps as an original ‘compilation’ of facts.” Mason had used his own skill and judgement to reconcile conflicting sources and translate them into lines and symbols, and that creative process met the bar for copyright. The court was careful to note that the underlying facts remained free for anyone to use, but Mason’s representation of those facts were eligible for protection under the law.

These cases bring us back to the discussion around fake facts. Could a mapmaker argue that invented streets or paper towns are really small works of fiction, and as such, protected by copyright? A federal court in New York considered a similar argument in 1992 in Nester’s Map and Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co. In this case, Nester published a guide for New York taxi drivers and claimed that Hagstrom had copied its listings, including trap streets and other entries that Nester had invented. In its decision, the court refused to protect the fictitious entries as creative works. Nester had presented this fictitious content to readers as facts, and under a doctrine called copyright estoppel, Nester could not turn around in court and then claim the facts were now creative fiction. The court reasoned that if false facts mixed in with real facts were protected, no one could reuse actual facts without risking infringement. That would mean that factual “information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated,” which was not the intention of copyright law or in the best interest of the public.

Taken together, these cases point to a general principal. Copyright protects the originality and creativity that goes into how facts are selected and represented, not the facts themselves, and a fictitious entry that is added can be treated as just another fact. A paper town, trap street, or phantom settlement can prove that a work was copied, but it cannot make the original, factual work copyrightable, since it has no protection of its own.

Meanwhile, Across the Water

Although the focus here is more on mapmaking and copyright in the United States, one of the most costly map copyright disputes on record did not involve fictitious towns or streets, but something known as fingerprinting. In October of 1996, the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, sent the Automobile Association (“AA”) a letter alleging that AA had used Ordnance Survey maps as source material for its own atlases and town plans. After years of twists and turns, the dispute ended in 2001, when AA agreed to pay £20 million in a settlement reached just hours before the case was due to go before a judge.

What makes the case so compelling is how the Ordnance Survey proved that there was copying. In a response to a Freedom of Information request (FOI), the agency explained that it compared the AA’s maps with its own and found places where its distinctive cartographic styling had been reproduced, a process known as fingerprinting. Its chief executive at the time, Vanessa Lawrence, said publicly that the agency did not plant deliberate mistakes, since doing so would mislead its customers, but these fingerprints were aesthetic design choices that were recognizable when inspected (for example, the way road widths were drawn). The Ordnance Survey was able to catch copying, not through the use of paper towns or trap streets, but by matching the creative similarities between the two maps, which is exactly the elements that copyright often protects.

lessons of paper towns

The history of paper towns and trap streets are a charming footnote in cartography, and one that intertwines with copyright in ways that are fascinating. Maps have been protected since the beginning of American copyright law, but the geography they depict has never belonged to anyone. What a mapmaker truly owns is how the map is depicted and the creative choices that make that representation unique. A paper town or trap street can help reveal how a map may have been used without permission, but on its own, it does not equate copyright infringement. Agloe, the court cases, and the Ordnance Survey all tell the same story in different ways. The fake is the clue, but the creativity is protected.

If you are like me and love maps and the work that goes into them, I highly recommended checking out Bellerby & Co Globemakers, who continue to make globes by hand. Oh, and p.s., their TikTok account is a beautiful feed cleanse if you are into that sort of thing.

sources

Kimberly Potvin
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