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.)
On the other hand, if you have two traps, and you see them filter out this one, then you may have evidence of malicious intent and be eligible for multiplied damages. (In my totally made up guess at applicable law).
Above is probably a meta-trap comment. I'd wager the whole discussion exists only to create an impression that this is a crowded space and dissuade potential competitors from entering the market.
Given the size of flight schedules datasets and the likelihood that not all the fake flights are that obvious, it's probably easier to buy the data from one of the proprietary schedule data vendors than clean up unauthorised scraped data...
Really? The 10+ years I was in the industry there weren't any such flights. I can believe it's changed, though -- that's interesting. Can you give an example flight?
Also safety reasons. It is most people's metabolic low point, where mental functioning is quantifiably impaired. So, good idea not to be doing landings and takeoffs during that time.
combination of low demand and the fact that for an airlines to have only a single flight at this time it means keeping desk and gate staff for only 1 or 2 flights that probably wont ever be full except peak travel season
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I've done this - works pretty well and is easy. I added my address since it was new construction and friends were getting routed about a mile away to a different street.
Satisfying to say "remember how google maps couldn't find my address? I fixed it". A bit of the IKEA effect going on there.
In the US they sourced at least some of their data from the Census TIGER data (In my town it still shows a big jag that is particular to recent TIGER data...).
The older editions of the TIGER data tended not to obsess over street level spatial accuracy, I think it was mostly used as a catalog of where a given address would be, so a few dozen meters was fine.
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.
While I agree with the conclusion that mapping data should be free, since it's useful infrastructure and will probably help the entire economy more than it costs to make it free, I don't see how your argument necessarily follows.
Governments can own things in a way that doesn't mean that everyone has property rights over it -- just a democratic right to influence how it is used. The government owns the pavement, that doesn't mean I can dig it up and take it away (copyright is different from this, but just to illustrate "government propety" != "everyone's property")
In the case of mapping data, a government can choose the invest money in a product, which it then sells to a subset of the population. Charging means that taxpayers pay less. It also means there are direct customers that can drive the development of the product along the economically highest impact lines.
You have to have some context in order for the argument against government owning copyrights to make sense.
1. Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that might not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; books, magazines, etc that without copyright nobody would have incentive to produce as anyone could just COPY it without investing the time to create it first
2. Copyright is thus a legal construct for ensuring that the people who did some creative or laborious act had SOME way of getting paid, namely rationing it economically
3. The government has already paid for the work to be done through taxes and this power is basically absolute; if you disagree try and not pay taxes and see how long you stay out of prison
4. Charging people for things the government does may or may not be more economically efficient, it really depends on the cost associated with the infrastructure to accept payments and ration out the goods versus the cost of simply publishing for free, in recent times it's gotten cheaper to publish and cheaper to accept money
5. The idea that the government has any right to ration information as opposed to physical goods is a tough sell because once the information is created and the marginal cost of replicating it is zero or very close to, what is the charging mechanism for?
I totally get why it might be better to ration roads or schools or whatever; they're tangible things and there's not an infinite amount of them. But everyone in the US can have a copy of the map for effectively free once it's been created so there's not a lot of good argument (at least in my opinion) why it shouldn't be free.
>Copyright was created in order to encourage the creation of things that might not otherwise be created were copyright not to exist; //
I'm really not so sure about this: initially, like in the Statute of Anne it was to protect publishers so they could profit from the work. This has a side-effect of encouraging creation in that content creators know they have the chance to make money rather than just having their work duplicated freely.
But in current renditions of copyright law the public domain is (or was) an important element - works that would otherwise have been held privately can be duplicated when the work is older, enriching the public domain just as patents enrich[ed] the public domain with information about inventions.
I think your assertion goes a step too far. WRT the US Constitution'd "copyright" clause [which I'm imagining you had in mind] isn't a million miles away but "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" could as easily be about making knowledge public as it is about rewarding authors of "Writings".
>initially, like in the Statute of Anne it was to protect publishers so they could profit from the work
How do you reconcile that claim with the opening of the Statute of Anne:
>Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families...
The problem was that publishers would just keep printing and selling, without compensating, or even informing the author. Copyright is a restriction on those who produce the physical artifact. It's probably one reason why those who produce the physical artifacts have been gobbling up copyrights for decades.
> it was to protect publishers so they could profit from the work
I don't see how protecting the publishers so they can profit from the work is any different than encouraging things to be made in the first place.
In a world with no big companies publishing and no copyright, the introduction of copyright allows authors to restrict copying and thus to get paid for their work. The introduction of publishers doesn't change this dynamic.
It moves writing from something that's done either altruistically or through patronage into the realm of something you can do as a business.
The people doing the printing get paid either way since they're charging you per page or per copy or whatever. They actually don't really care what the content is, how it's protected, etc. Their business model is predicated on real tangible things, namely paper and ink.
Writing isn't predicated on the restriction of real tangible things so much as intangible ones; a book is much, much more about the information it contains than the actual paper or bits that make it up. Which is why copyright is considered intellectual property, not real property.
> 3. The government has already paid for the work to be done through taxes and this power is basically absolute; if you disagree try and not pay taxes and see how long you stay out of prison
Why shouldn't the government have a mechanism for funding future work (through monetization of copyright)?
For example a portion of tax payer money may be used to fund an initial effort that is then intended to be self-funded going forward (particularly for efforts that require additional work to complete, or ongoing maintenance). In this way the cost burden largely falls on the consumer of the information (who is presumably getting some value from the information) versus the general tax payer.
OK so then why isn't the Constitution copyrighted? I mean, surely the government could charge plenty of money to access the text of it to all kinds of different parties. If you wanted to sue someone for breaching your rights, you'd have to pay! We could cut down on all these spurious "you violated my rights" lawsuits that tie up the Supreme Court every year by just charging $1mm and then only the most egregious violations would make it there and everything would run much more smoothly, right?
What is the tragedy of the commons whereby everyone uses the information contained in a map? There is no "commons" in ideas because a "commons" is absolutely a real tangible thing whereby when one person uses it, another cannot. The "commons" is originally a piece of land that is overgrazed because nobody has any incentive not to use it and every incentive to overuse it.
If you and I both have digital copies of a map does that somehow preclude another person? No, it does not. Since it does not, how is it in any way a tragedy of the commons? How is it possible for information to be over-used?
Using analogies to physical situations totally falls flat because in this case the thing is non-physical. It's the same "you wouldn't steal a movie" argument because copying a movie is not the same as stealing one!
> What is the tragedy of the commons whereby everyone uses the information contained in a map?
The problem would be nobody paying for it so you stop making / updating maps. Think open source software that everyone uses, but nobody supports so it stops being maintained. Sure, a map is great, less so if it's 120 years out of date.
Now you could use taxes to pay for it, but then people who don't use the maps are taxed for something they don't use.
PS: As to why the governments making it in the first place. The military for one wants high quality maps even if the public wants different types of maps there is still a lot of overlap.
I understand the history of copyright, but in general I don't understand why copyright can't be an incentive for governments to create and maintain information products such as maps, just as much as it is for companies/individuals. Without copyright and the ability to charge for use, the government might not want to spend the larger amount of money to create or maintain the dataset.
As a taxpayer, I'd much rather the government made a profit from its commercially-motivated research or IP ventures rather than simply spending its tax revenues underwriting the profits of third parties that copy its work.
Tax money is not taxpayer money. As soon as one pays their taxes, it is no longer their money. If taxpayers want tax money used in a certain way, they should convince voters to tell the government to use it in that way.
That's how taxes work.
Talking about 'taxpayer money' is language trying to establish an entitlement to tax money that tax payers do not have. It is anti-democratic language because in trying to establish such a spurious entitlement, it throws the power of the electorate to dictate government under the bus.
I'm curious where all the assertions in your argument came from, because they do not come from law, and they do not come from classical Liberalism which is the foundation of western democracies. I've only ever seen it trotted out in an attempt to establish a relation of accountability between governments and property owners instead of the foundational relation of accountability between governments and voters. Doesn't sound so nice, really.
HN's obsession for trap locations is starting to become uncanny.
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!
It's a common topic posted by people looking for a big boost of karma.
1. Find the most popular topics (by points) in HN
2. Manually filter out 'event' topics (e.g. product releases, time specific news items, etc) that won't work when reposted
3. Wait until a topic hasn't been raised for a while and post a unique URL (either a related URL that hasn't been posted as a topic but maybe appeared in the discussion, or an existing URL that is made unique)
4. Hope for big boost of karma
Which is why we often see many of the same old subjects being brought up again and again. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm sure that some are being posted by people trying to get their karma scores up.
It's a trap topic. Anyone submitting it gets flagged as karma-seeker. Anyone whining about it in comments also gets flagged in the system. What the moderators do with that data is classified.
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.
