New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is in a heap of financial trouble. It is more than $40 billion in debt; it has a $60 billion maintenance backlog; plus it has more than $20 billion in unfunded health care obligations.
Instead of addressing these problems, the MTA is going after an artist named Jake Berman for violating the MTA’s copyright by making and selling a map of MTA’s subway network.
The MTA says that Berman’s map looks like the official MTA map, which is to be expected since they are both mapping the same thing. Berman’s map looks like an abstract version of the subway system known as the Vignelli map, which MTA wasn’t even using until two years after Berman started distributing his map on the web. Continue reading
