This sounds like the sort of scam that a certain company in my corner of the world tried to pull - they bought rights to map data and threatened small businesse

This sounds like the sort of scam that a certain company in my corner of the world tried to pull - they bought rights to map data and threatened small businesses that had maps on their websites(even small, "hand-drawn" ones) that they'll report them to the authorities for copyright infringement(prosecuted ex officio), unless the businesses in question pay a "licensing fee". Eventually they made the mistake of trying to silence a thread about them on a legal advice forum, which resulted in an interesting legal battle during which it was established that a fragment of a map does not constitute copyrighted material, so their threats were empty from the get go.