Related: MapQuest is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. It used to be that if you searched Google Maps for MapQuest, it would point you to the wrong location.... which gave MapQuest a good idea of which MapQuest job candidates used Google for directions to their place.
I wonder how much this counted against an applicant.
In every substantial way, Google Maps was simply a better product than MapQuest from day one. Shockingly better. Would it be such an affront that MapQuest applicants should have a sense of taste?
Especially on the road to making their product better, if anything, using Google Maps should've been a bonus in an applicant's favor. Their sense of taste could move the organization forward.
It comes down to this bit of dialogue written by Aaron Sorkin: "If you're stupid, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you."
The Google Maps debut product was so astonishingly good it instantly changed user behavior. You had to use it just once to realize everything that came before was insultingly bad. Immediate loyalty. It was a cataclysmic shift in the space.
So, if it's me, and I'm hiring at MapQuest, and I have IQ that's expressed with at least two digits, I'm in a desperate search for smart people to come help me turn the ship. If they're using the competitor's product, that's fucking awesome. We're going to need as much competitive insight as we can get to make this turd into something people want to use again.
The problem is that they can't change the UI model without pissing off their existing userbase that likes clicking cardinal arrows to shift the map tiles around. Google's never going to implement that interface, even their nojs interface uses a different UI model.
If Mapquest's users wanted GMaps, they'd have switched by now. Aping that would only infuriate them, and since Google will always do a better job of implementing the rich JS interface than Mapquest can, the previously-recalcitrant users would just switch.
OP suggested this was happening back in the day. Either way:
MapQuest didn't suck because of its UI model. MapQuest sucked because it was clunky, slow, and cluttered. Its implementation was crap.
When you look at today's MapQuest, they've largely corrected this. The maps are much less ugly, they now pick a (somewhat) reasonable level of detail based on your zoom level and moving around the map is fast whether you're using their joystick control or dragging the map.
The sad thing is, none of this is rocket science. It shouldn't have taken them this long to figure out. Google Maps steadily, inevitably eroded their market share and last I heard, they were 10% behind.
I stopped using MapQuest because I got tired of the errors in it - locations were often a mile or more away from where MapQuest said they were, leaving me driving around in circles.
when I was interviewing at Yahoo, at one point in the interview I was making an excuse about not remembering some command line argument to some obscure program. "Oh, I'd just google that" I said. the boss said "we try not to say that here"
According to Wikipedia, trap streets are not copyrightable:
In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., 796 F.Supp. 729, E.D.N.Y., 1992, a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court stated: "[t]o 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." (Id. at 733)
I was just talking to an old school journalist last night about the same topic. A perhaps apocryphal story (it's not on Google, so it can't be true, can it?) but good nonetheless:
Years ago, well before even Murdoch ownership, the NY Post was knicking sports scores from the New York Daily News. Competition being what it was, the Daily News went so far as to not only falsify some scores, but to falsify some schools, making up new institutes of education throughout the 5 boroughs.
I can only imagine the page one headlines once the Post was outed.
This sort of stuff has been around for a while. One of the big Supreme Court rulings on the copyrightability of datasets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) concerned a company that got sued for copying 4000 entries from a competitor's phone book. They got busted because they'd unknowingly copied fake entries.
I wouldn't call it getting busted. The court held that they were allowed to copy the data, overturning the sweat of the brow doctrine:
The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable, and that therefore no infringement existed.
Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow doctrine, which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural.
This is a term that can lead to mis-communication. Most of the context I know the term "got busted" implies punishment. The exact usage and implications vary from place to place, often varying by very large amounts, so care is required in the usage of such informal terms.
Not really - you can't copyright facts. IANAL, but if you want to create a map based on another map's information, you're free to do so. Google Feist v. Rural for more info.
Correct. You can't just photocopy the map, but you can recreate it.
iSubwayMaps.com ran into copyright problems with the MTA in New York a while back. Instead of paying the MTA to use their official maps they just recreated the map themselves, using the official map as the only source. This, apparently, doesn't violate copyright law, even though the resulting maps are very similar.
Two things about this particular case that at the very least complicate (if not invalidate) your point:
1. When you copy a map, you usually don't make a Xerox (i.e. take the map tiles from Google Maps) -- you trace over it or recreate the underlaying data. Thus you're not copying the representation of the map but the abstract collection of facts that were used to generate the creative picture.
2. Is there any creative work being done when you use automated cartography (i.e. a set of human beings aren't hand-drawing the map based on your data from #1)? In the case of automated cartography I can see the cartographic style data being copyrightable but I don't think the actual tiled image representation of the map data is copyrightable.
Of course, this is all (theoretically) a moot point because the Terms of Use prohibit automated use of Google Maps' data.
But the non-information that is the trap door makes the whole copyrightable.
If the trap door shows up on your map, you cannot claim that your map is factual. You cannot claim your map is a 100% copy of mine, either, as that would be copyright infringement. IANAL, but I doubt that a judge would rule otherwise.
The parent cites a case (Feist v. Rural) where a judge ruled otherwise. Feist copied fictitious entries from Rural, but it was not considered copyright infringement.
Yes, I overlooked that, but I do not think that argumentation is applicable to this case. The Wikipedia page about that case states:
"O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself."
and
"the standard for creativity is extremely low"
For a map, the creative aspects are way stronger than for a phone directory. Therefore, I still think that copying significant parts of a map would be infringement. Trap doors would help strengthen the case that copying took place.
I trust you've also seen the Wikipedia article cited elsewhere in these comments, where copying fictitious map entries was also ruled non-infringing? A map is ostensibly a presentation of facts, and while there are creative decisions involved that can be copyrighted, trap streets are not among these decisions. In the U.S., at least, it's not enough to establish that copying took place, if facts are the only things being copied.
And that's a good thing. If intentional factual errors were copyrightable, newspapers would fill their articles with misspellings and falsehoods in hopes that they could sue competing publications out of existence.
In the US the government isn't even allowed to hold copyright on its works — the taxpayers funded it, so all Government publishings must be public domain.
In the UK and Commonwealth countries the Crown holds full copyright by default over all government works.
The actual images themselves are copyrighted images. However you can copyright a collection of facts, e.g. a phone book. It's the collation of facts that is copyrighted. How much of it you can copy before you get into copyright is up to a judge.
Apple took advantage of this in its lawsuit against Apple II cloner Franklin Computer. Franklin claimed it had independently developed its ROM and OS code. On examining Franklin's code, Apple found some no-op string variables containing, e.g., the name of an Apple developer and "Appleworks." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankli....
I can't really resist saying, because it's such a coincidence, that I _live_ in this picture and walk up Lavender Sweep. The trap street wasn't there in Google maps last time I looked, I assume they must move them around.
