Lure avenue – Wikipedia

Fictitious avenue on a map

In cartography, a lure avenue is a fictitious entry within the type of a misrepresented street on a map, usually exterior the world the map nominally covers, for the aim of “trapping” potential plagiarists of the map who, if caught, can be unable to clarify the inclusion of the “lure avenue” on their map as harmless. On maps that aren’t of streets, different “lure” options (reminiscent of nonexistent towns, or mountains with the mistaken elevations) could also be inserted or altered for a similar objective.^[1]

Lure streets are sometimes nonexistent streets; however typically, relatively than really depicting a avenue the place none exists, a map will misrepresent the character of a avenue in a vogue that may nonetheless be used to detect copyright violators however is much less prone to intrude with navigation. For example, a map would possibly add nonexistent bends to a avenue, or depict a serious avenue as a slender lane, with out altering its location or its connections to different streets.

Lure streets are hardly ever acknowledged by publishers. One recognized case is a well-liked driver’s atlas for the town of Athens, Greece, which has a warning inside its entrance cowl that potential copyright violators ought to watch out for lure streets.^[2]

Examples[edit]

In an version of the BBC Two programme Map Man, first broadcast 17 October 2005, a spokesperson for the Geographers’ A-Z Map Company claimed there are “about 100” lure streets included within the London A-Z Avenue atlas. One such avenue, “Bartlett Place”, a real however misnamed walkway (named after Kieran Bartlett, an worker at Geographers’ A-Z Map Firm), was recognized within the programme and can seem in future editions beneath its actual title, Broadway Stroll.

It has been advised that Google Earth positioned Sandy Island, New Caledonia, because the geographical analogue to a lure avenue, though historic proof implies that it originated as a cartographical error and Google merely handed the error alongside.

Authorized points[edit]

Lure streets should not copyrightable beneath the federal legislation of the United States. In Nester’s Map & Information Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co. (1992),^[3]^[4] a United States federal courtroom discovered that copyright traps should not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the courtroom acknowledged: “[t]o deal with ‘false’ info interspersed amongst precise info and represented as precise info as fiction would imply that nobody may ever reproduce or copy precise info with out threat of reproducing a false reality and thereby violating a copyright … If such had been the legislation, data may by no means be reproduced or broadly disseminated.” (Id. at 733)

In a 2001 case, The Automobile Association within the United Kingdom agreed to settle a case for £20,000,000 when it was caught copying Ordnance Survey maps. On this case, the figuring out “fingerprints” weren’t deliberate errors however relatively stylistic options such because the width of roads.^[5]

In one other case, the Singapore Land Authority sued Virtual Map, a web-based writer of maps, for infringing on its copyright. The Singapore Land Authority acknowledged in its case that there have been deliberate errors in maps they’d supplied to Digital Map years earlier. Digital Map denied this and insisted that it had finished its personal cartography.^[6]

Cultural references[edit]

The 1979 science fiction novel The Ultimate Enemy by Fred Saberhagen consists of the quick story “The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron” wherein a salesman permits a draft of a brand new Encyclopedia Galactica to be captured by alien battle machines. It leads them to imagine there’s a close by planet ripe for assault, however the planet is definitely a copyright lure and the aliens are led away from inhabited worlds, saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

The 2010 novel Kraken by China Miéville options the lure streets of the London A-Z being locations the place the magical denizens of the town can exist with out threat of being disturbed by regular folks.

A 2013 movie, Trap Street, inverts the same old which means of a lure avenue, changing into an actual avenue which is intentionally obscured or faraway from a map—and anybody who makes an attempt to establish it by inserting it on public document is then “trapped”.^[7]

The 2015 Doctor Who episode “Face the Raven” incorporates a hidden avenue the place alien asylum seekers have taken shelter. Resulting from a psychic area that subconsciously makes observers ignore it, outsiders contemplate it a lure avenue once they see it on maps. One scene entails the character Clara Oswald discussing the definition of “lure avenue”. The episode’s working title was additionally “Lure Avenue”.