Mapmakers routinely put fake streets, fake towns, and fake bridges on their maps in order to protect their copyright. If they see those same fakes places on someone else’s map, they instantly know that they’ve been robbed and by whom. A good example is Agloe — a fictional town in Colchester, Delaware County, New York, that became an actual landmark after mapmakers made up the community as a phantom settlement. Agloe became so famous that it attracted a lot of visitors. The increased traffic allowed a little town to become established, with its own gas station and general store. A “paper town” is like a “trap street.” A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map for the purpose of trapping potential copyright violators of the map. If caught, they would be unable to explain the inclusion of the trap street on their map as an innocent mistake. The practice of hiding fake data within genuine data was also followed by dictionary, encyclopedia and phone book publishers who inserted fake entries to determine if someone was copying their work.
