Fun fact: at ITA Software we put "trap flights" into the data so we could tell when people were using our data without our knowledge. These were flights between totally obscure city pairs, that departed a single day of the year at 3am. (No scheduled flights depart between 0300 and 0359 local time anywhere in the world.)
In the past I've used a trap unicode character in a name in a public wiki-style CC-BY licensed database of politicians to confirm that a site was (not maliciously) failing to credit us.<p>This resulted in the person who was using our data reverting the unicode character edit in our database, probably because it was breaking their import scripts.
I strongly suspect that the place where I live was used as a trap street by Google Maps for years.<p>It is a newly constructed apartment building in the outskirts of a small town. A small alley at the corner of the street where I live, which doesn't have any apartment numbers, was shown heavily distorted in the map (actually stepping over my building).<p>Beyond a desire of accuracy, I complained to the Google Maps because the distortion was extending to the part of my street where my apartment's doorstep is located, and delivery men were having problems to find my address. After several months sending bug reports, they finally fixed the corner layout.<p>I think this is an actual example of trap street because the accumulation of symptoms (supposedly no one living at that particular point, low traffic street, remote area, recent construction). If I'm right, this example shows that placing such traps can have an impact on the people living there.
Governments should not own copyrights. A copyright is the ownership to a published work. However, taxpayers paid for the creation of the work, so they are the actual owners. Since everyone owns the work, there is no enforceable right.
HN's obsession for trap locations is starting to become uncanny.<p>I'm not going to complain about it, though - no matter how obscure and niche it is, I gotta agree that it remains an interesting topic. How far can we push the obsession? Surprise me!
The relevant Wikipedia article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right</a><p>The question of how to enforce "Database Rights" boils down to proving that the data is both yours (through the use of fake data like trap streets), and that the act of compiling the data is non-trivial.
Another interesting story about the same topic<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an-imaginary-town-becomes-real-then-not-true-story" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/03/18/290236647/an...</a>
My new favorite trap is the MOUNTWEAZEL, a lexicographical trap street embedded in dictionaries to catch infringers.<p>Good episode of the The Allusionist podcast: <a href="http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel" rel="nofollow">http://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/mountweazel</a>