Maps are very hard to make.
To create a map from scratch, one has to do years of field work or analyzation of satellite
photos so plagiarism has always been rampant among mapmakers.
It’s pretty easy to just redraw the same geographical features from one map onto a
new map, and it hard to get caught.
You are, after all, drawing the exact same world.
So mapmakers came up with a way to catch individuals stealing their data.
This is Argleton in West Lancashire, England.
According to this 2009 screenshot of Google Maps, Argleton is a town.
It’s supposedly located between Aughton, to the south and Ormskirk, to the north.
The problem is, if you go to this site, this, is what you find.
Aughton was placed on the map as a paper town.
Paper towns are are fake places that are put on maps as copyright traps.
A mapmaker can make up a place, and if they see that a competing mapmaker also has that
town on their maps, they know that at one point the competitor plagiarized their info.
So in Argleton’s case, the town probably wasn’t placed there by Google.
Google gets their data from Tele Atlas who sources their data from other mapping companies,
who in turn get some of their data from other mapping companies.
Somewhere down the line, someone must have placed Argleton on the map as a trap and its
presence on Google Maps was just a remnant of that.
After the fake town gained widespread media attention, Google removed it from their maps
and it has since been replaced with a marker designating the spot as a “ghost town.”
There are hundreds of other examples of paper towns.
In New York, a spot north of Roscoe, New York was marked as the town of Agloe by the General
Drafting Company in 1930.
The name came from an anagram of the cartographers initials and appeared on numerous maps since
its conception.
In the 1960’s, Agloe showed up on a Rand McNally map of the region and, thinking that
they had fallen into their trap, Esso, who had bought the map from the General Drafting
Company, threatened to sue McNally.
The suit was dropped, though, when Rand McNally pointed out that Agloe had actually become
a real place.
Sometime in the 1950’s, locals opened up a General Store north of Roscoe, New York,
and, after looking at an Esso map of the region, decided to call their store the Agloe General
Store, therefore making Agloe an official place.
The store eventually went out of business and the town has since disappeared from most
maps, but, this was one instance where a fake town became real.
A similar idea to paper towns has been used in other domains.
In 2001, the word esquivalence appeared in the New Oxford American Dictionary defined
as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities.”
That word was made up as a copyright trap, and… it actually worked!
dictionary.com and google’s dictionary both added a listing for the word esquivalence,
possibly proving a level of plagiarism among the online dictionaries.
Occasionally, unintentional traps are created that prove effective.
Before they created Apple Maps, Apple was making maps on a much smaller scale for iPhoto.
These maps had no attributions and therefore no one can be sure where their data was from,
but there were some obvious clues.
This screenshot of Apple’s map of Norwich shows an area of disorganized roads to the
northeast.
If you look at the Open Street Map map of the area, you can see that these roads are
actually trails in a park.
Overlaying the Apple map over the OSM map of the area, you can see how perfectly the
supposed roads and trails line up.
You can assume from this that Apple took their map data from Open Street Map and mistook
the trails for roads.
A few months after the release, Apple officially credited Open Street Map for their contributions
to the maps confirming that they used OSM’s data.
So those are paper towns.
I hope you enjoyed this weeks episode.
I’ll be back next week to bring you more from that wikipedia list.