Agloe, New York (The Paper Town)
"The fictional copyright trap that became a real place when someone built a store there"
In the 1930s, General Drafting Company founders Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers inserted a fake town—'Agloe' (an anagram of their initials)—at a dirt road intersection in the Catskills to catch potential copyright infringers.
Cartographic Origin Story
When competitor Rand McNally later published a map showing Agloe, General Drafting threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Rand McNally proved in court that they hadn't copied the map: a local business owner had seen Agloe on the map and opened the 'Agloe General Store', making Agloe an actual physical locality.
The quintessential demonstration of cartographic self-fulfilling prophecy: a fictional map artifact materialized into physical reality.
Scientific Disproof or Geological Fate
The store eventually went out of business and the settlement dissolved. Agloe was officially removed from USGS maps in the 1990s, though it remains legendary in intellectual property lore.