Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Mountweazels

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Copyright is what protects creators from having someone copy and make money off of their work without compensation. However, there are some things like directories or maps which have information that can be difficult to copyright. It’s just presenting information or data which exists out in the real world. Such creators of maps and directories have found unique ways around this problem. Learn more about copyright traps, aka Mountweazels, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Copyright is what protects creators from having someone copy and make money off of their work without compensation. However, there are some things like directories or maps, which have information that can be difficult to copyright. It's just presenting information or data which exists out in the real world. Creators of maps and directories have found unique ways around this problem. Learn more about copyright traps, aka Mount Weasels, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is The Copyright Wars, three centuries of transatlantic battle by Peter Baldwin. Today's copyright wars can seem unprecedented. Sparked by the digital revolution that has made copyright and its violation, a part of everyday life, fights over intellectual property have pitted creators against consumers and open access advocates. But while the digital generation can be forgiving for thinking that the dispute between creators and consumers is new,

the copyright wars in fact stretch back three centuries, and their history is essential to understanding today's battles. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to, Audible trial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Let's suppose I wanted to start a company that sold maps. I could hire cartographers and spend a lot of time and money going out and gathering data. Because I'm just documenting something which exists in reality, the end result of all my hard work and investment is going to look just like other maps that are out there already. So why couldn't I just skip all the effort and copy the maps which already exist? Sure, I'll change the font and the colors.

but fundamentally the end result is going to be the same either way, right? This is a big problem for any maker of reference products, maps, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. You can't copyright facts, but you can take steps to show that someone is a plagiarist or violating copyright. They do this via copyright traps. Copyright traps are nothing more than false information, which is put in reference material to catch people who copy their content. If you copy everything without checking, you'll copy the false information, which will be evidence of plagiarism. Perhaps the most famous example was in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia. They created an entry for one, Lillian Virginia Mount Weasel.

They created a full entry in the encyclopedia for, which was totally fiction. According to the entry, Lillian Mount Weasel was a photographer who was famous for her photos of South Sierra Miwak, whatever that is. According to the entry, quote, Mount Weasel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for combustibles magazine, unquote. While there was no cases of anyone actually copying the Mount Weasel entry, the term Mount Weasel is now a term for a copyright trap. There's a Lillian Mount Weasel Facebook page and the Lillian Virginia Mount Weasel Research Center website, which has fake interviews with people who knew her, as well as fake copies of combustibles magazine. While this is one of the best known examples of copyright trap, it's hardly the only one. The 1943 edition of Webster's 20th century dictionary had an entry for

Jungfattack, spelled J-U-N-G-F-T-A-K. The entry read, quote, Jungfetak, noun. A Persian bird, the male of which only had one wing on the right side, and the female only one wing on the left side. Instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone and the female an island. of bone, and it was by uniting hook and I that they were unable to fly. Each one alone had to remain on the ground." End quote.

There is no pronunciation given, so I'm pretty sure I said it correctly because there is no way to say it correctly. The new Oxford American Dictionary has a definition for the word esquivalence. Their definition of the word is the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities. The thing is, this fake word has actually found some usage, and there is now, an entry for it in Wictionary, which references the original New Oxford American Dictionary definition. Personally, I think esquivalence is a perfectly crumulent word. Perhaps the heaviest users of copyright traps are mapmakers.

In cartography, copyright traps are known as trap streets. Trap streets are fictional streets or locations, which are used to check to see if someone is copying their map. They are usually very small streets or alleys of no importance, as no one actually uses it as an address because it doesn't exist, there isn't too much of a problem if they appear on maps. The state of Michigan put fake towns in Ohio in their 1978 official highway roadmap. The towns were Beatiso, spelled Beat OSU, and Go Blue, aka Go Blue, the colors of the University of Michigan. The publishers of the London A to Z Street Atlas have confessed that there are over

100 trap streets in the pages of their Atlas. The best example of a fake location on a map is the town of Aglo, New York. In the 1930s, the general drafting company was working on a roadmap for New York State. Two cartographers, Otto Lindberg and Ernst Elpers, created a copyright trap just north of the town of Roscoe, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. They invented the town of Aglo, based on the anagram of their names, and put it at the intersection of two dirt roads. In the 1950s, someone built a general store at the location, and seen the name Egglo on the map, named it the Egglo General Store. Then, Rand McNally created a map with Egglo on it.

Rand McNally was threatened with a lawsuit, but they then claimed that they got their information from the county, and that the fictitious place had now become real, so they couldn't be sued. The issue of fake places on a map actually has been the subject of a lawsuit in 1992. In the case of Nestor's Map and Guide Corporation versus Hegstrom Map Company, the court ruled, quote, 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, unquote. So basically, putting in fake data can help you embarrass those who copy you, but it doesn't mean you can be protected by copyright law. Dictionaries, maps, and encyclopedias aren't the only sources that use fake data. In the 1903 book The Musical Guide, they had a section that listed musical instruments. One of the instruments was the Z-Z-J-O-J-O-A-N-W, which they claimed was a Maori word for a fife or flute. The word is still occasionally appearing in books today. American painter Gilbert Stewart did a famous portrait of George W. Washington. After he created the painting, he was commissioned to make duplicates of it.

In all of the duplicates, in the books in the background, he misspelled the word states by dropping one of the teas so you could tell the copies from the original. Sometimes it has nothing to do with copy thieves. Sometimes it's just being funny. Jakob Maria Mirchide has been a member of the German Bundestag since 1979. He sits on the committee for small and medium-sized businesses. According to the official Bundestag directory, he was born in Morbach Hunsruc, a very rural constituency in Rhineland-Platonet. He is Catholic and a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. And he is also totally fake.

There are literally 615 names in the Bundestag Directory, even though there are only 614 members. He has an incredibly detailed biography and even has his own Twitter account. Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic, but one day I would like to see Jakub Maria Mirshide go on a day. date with Lillian Virginia Mount Weasel to visit the beautiful town of Aglo, New York. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla. The associate producer is Thor Thompson.

Remember to leave a five-star review to get your review read on the show. They can be left at Apple Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcast Republic, or wherever you listen to the show. Also, you can help support the show over at patreon.com. Patrons can get merchandise like t-shirts and hoodies, as well as having direct access to provide suggestions for future episodes. Thank you.