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I worked with one content publisher that put a large amount of reference
material on the Internet who used several similar techniques to determine
if content had been copied from them, including occasional use of
foreign-alphabet look-alike characters (but with a different Unicode
value). Readers most often didn't notice the characters, but the publisher
could do a web search for those specific words with the replaced characters
to locate people who had copied and pasted content from the site.
It's harder now because most modern browsers and web creation tools include
spell checkers, but there are similar techniques that I know are still in
use. The content publishers aren't typically excited about talking about
the specifics, for obvious reasons.
On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 13:28:48 -0400, Lippincott, Richard <
> RLippincott -at- as-e -dot- com> wrote:
>
> I've been putting a trap of sorts in the manuals I've been doing for my
>> present employer.
>>
>
> My father did this around 1957 for his weekly newspaper. He had been
> troubled by a local daily paper that would copy his stories, rather than
> writing their own. In one story he named a local politician whom we will
> call James Jones, as James B. Jones. On paper day Jones called him,
> indignant. "Why did you call me James B. Jones? You know I don't have a
> middle initial!" My father said, "Look in tomorrow's edition of the [city]
> Sun."
>
> The next day Jones called my father and said, "Well, I'll be damned!"
>
> No legal action resulted, but I'd bet that the editor of the Sun heard
> about what had happened, and the reporter might have been told to write his
> own material, or at least check facts, henceforth.
>
>
>
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