The London Underground has wasted farepayers’ money by harassing a site that maintains a collection of alternative tube-maps, including parodies, useful maps that show the geographical relationships between stations, and so on. This comes on the heels of Transport for London censoring a map that labelled all the station-names with humorous anagrams. There’s no legal need to do this (anyone who tells you that companies who fail to police every use of their marks, including noncommercial uses, parodies, etc will lose their trademarks is either lying or ignorant, it’s simply untrue). The company is alienating and punishing riders for lionizing and promoting it.
On the plus side, Geoff from Geofftech, which hosts all the cool tube-map remixes, isn’t taking this lying down. He’s posted the full details of his fight with the attorneys at Transport for London’s firm, and has yet to comply with their orders.
Lots of London solicitors read this site — anyone want to make a name for her/himself by taking on Geoff’s case pro-bono? Seems like a golden opportunity to set some meaningful precedent in English law.
So I got directly through to the solicitor used by TFL and we spoke pleasantly for about ten minutes, whilst I rather (pointlessly?) argued my case whilst they said lots of things referring to “My Client” (meaning TFL) which always makes me chuckle under my breath as it sounds so fucking poncy.
The long and the short of it is, is that I can’t afford any legal representation to argue this one, so when I said “What will you do if I don’t remove the images that you want taken down?” they said that they would get my site taken down for me.
So at the moment, I have “by Monday” (which led to another fun email exchange shortly after as we argued exactly what time on Monday ‘by Monday’ meant), to remove all the ‘offending’ maps that are on this page here, meaning that if you want copies, then go and grab them now.
(Thanks, Nic and Murray!)