But his New York City subway map, according to Metropolitan Transportation Authority lawyers who filed a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was a violation of the MTA's copyright for its own subway map. Berman, they contended, could not sell his version.

On Tuesday afternoon, Jake Berman got an email from Etsy informing him that one of his listings had been removed from its website for copyright infringement. Berman makes his own versions of transit maps, which he meticulously designs over hundreds of hours of work.

When he got the notice, Berman felt “a little bit of disgust and a little bit of disbelief,” he told Motherboard in an interview, because “it requires a certain amount of audacity on the part of their lawyers to say that something that somebody else created is actually the MTA's property.”

Indeed, experts are puzzled by the MTA’s copyright claim. For one, Berman’s map is clearly not a copy of the MTA’s subway map. But even if it was, it’s curious the MTA, which has an operating budget of $16.6 billion for this year alone, would concern itself with the piddling revenues lost from one subway map sold on Etsy.

“The basic question [for the MTA]” offered Thomas Kjellberg, an intellectual property attorney with the law firm Cowan, Liebowitz, and Latman, “you guys really give a shit?”

In a statement, MTA spokesperson Shams Tarek said the agency reviews potential copyright infringement issues on a case-by-case basis. He added Berman’s map has “been copied from our intellectual property which we have an obligation to protect on behalf of the people of New York.”

Arguing over the intellectual property of maps is as old as America itself. For almost as long as this country has existed, maps have been copyrighted by their makers. The Copyright Act of 1790 covered “any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States…” before adding a whole bunch of conditions.