| Thursday, March 16, 2006 |  |
| Silly Tube Maps |
 Anybody who's ever made it through the Underground in London, on a day when they weren't striking, will know and possibly love the well-known map of lines and stations that guides your way. A masterpiece of clear design. But also, because it is so well known, an obvious opportunity for improving it a bit by remixing it. You can scramble the station names into fun anagrams as seen above. You can lay out the map the way it would look if it were geographically correct. You can translate it into German, you can pretend that the stations were sponsored by big corporations, etc. So, a fellow named Geoff Marshall made a splendid site hosting a collection of just such remixed tube maps. All good clean fun ... until the lawyers for Transport for London send him a cease and desist letter explaining that the tube map is their trademark and they won't allow him to have it on his site, and that they'd sue him if he didn't remove it. Geoff's story is here. Since he wasn't in a mood to end up in court with these guys, he reluctantly removed the maps from his server, and instead posted a list of mirror sites that had a copy. After which the same lawyers bullied his ISP into forcing him to remove that list too, as he was "linking to copyrighted material", as if that was any kind of crime. Now, this is really dumb of Transport of London. No reason to spoil the fun and make everybody hate you. Besides, you can't really stop something like that on the net. On the contrary, by threatening everybody you just turn it into a noble cause, which gets much more attention than it would otherwise. So, for example, I now put up a mirror of everything Geoff had on his site. There you go, go and enjoy the fun tube maps. I probably wouldn't have thought of doing that if it wasn't a hot issue like that. Now it is about cultural freedom. More here on BoingBoing, which also has posted many remixed subway maps from around the world. [ Culture | 2006-03-16 02:26 | 4 comments | PermaLink ] More > |