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Makes me think of the trick we used a large website I used to work for: we'd have everybody and their mother copy our T&S because that was easier that writing it themselves. So we added a 2 very uncommon spelling mistakes into it on purpose. After that just a simple google Alert on those keywords would tell us immediately when someone copied our T&S.

Adding something weird/uncommon can make something easily measurable (as showcased in both my example as the article).




As well as dictionaries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esquivalience

I wonder what other companies that make a living by selling data sets do this sort of thing?


Thanks for that link. Unknowingly I did exactly the same thing (we invented a non-existant island in the geography of the site I was working on).


In its early days, Apple embedded a couple of no-op string variables, including the name of one of its programmers, in the code in the Apple II's ROM. Franklin Computing produced a clone. Apple didn't have to look hard to find its programmer's name in the cloned code. Apple successfully sued for copyright infringement. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankli....




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