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Originally Posted by Apache
Before computers and GPS mapmakers used to add nonexistent streets to their maps. If another company published maps with those streets on them they could be easily sued for copyright infringement.
Apache
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Trap streets were useful for tipping off a company that someone had copied information from their source, so that they could then look to see if copyrightable material had also been stolen. But they generally aren't copyrightable in and of themselves (at least in the US and UK), and courts have mostly shot down attempts to sue over infringement based on trap features themselves.
See
Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., where the court held that
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To treat "false" facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright. If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated.
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And
Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Andrew H. Amsterdam dba Franklin Maps which held that:
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As noted above, the names of geographic features may not be copyrighted; thus, fictitious names may not be copyrighted. Similarly, the existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact."
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