The MTA is going after an Etsy artist over a New York subway map it didn’t make
I am going to go against the grain here a bit. While I do think it is dumb that publicly funded IP isn&#x27;t shared under a creative commons permissive license, I do think the maps do look very similar.<p>I&#x27;m having a little trouble finding the link, but I read an interesting article sometime in the past few years (possibly after it was posted on HN) about the difficulty of designing good metro maps. Geographically accurate maps would be cluttered and confusing, so lots of thought has to go into how geography is manipulated to make an understandable and visually pleasing design. The work that goes I to this is copyrightable, and I do think the two maps share a lot of these elements. Yes the independent map was worked on for 300 hours, but adding up all of the changes over the years probably amounts to thousands of hours to generate the original map.<p>Again I don&#x27;t necessarily think this is a good use of government funds or time, but I don&#x27;t believe the copyright claim is compeletely invalid.