Apart from maps. Are there any objects that copyright traps are put in that anyone may know of?
Wikipedia has an entire article of bunches of different examples at Fictitious Entry.
As you may already know, they’re of no legal use in the US after the 1991 Feist decision.
Many many moons ago, the student union published the telephone directory of all the students in the university I went to. They also would rent out the name collection to mass mail marketers, a good business in those days (IIRC, about 10,000 students). To ensure it was not simply copied, they inserted fictitious names in there to determine if someone was abusing or copying the directory, or reusing the list without paying for the privilege - If Fred Smith at a certain mailbox got a mass mailing, it was from an unpaid use of the mailing list.
The small town where I grew up had a small town newspaper. The newspaper also printed the local phone book. I was sitting with the editor one evening, and we had fun making up fictional entries as copyright traps. The funniest was “Lois Carmen Denominator.” For a while, she was listed in the phone book; the phone number was the front office of the newspaper.
(I wish I could take credit for Ms. Denominator, but it was the editor who thought of it.)
My business sells data sets that work for a very specific computer program. In each one I set up 5 fictitious items that I can find very easily.
You win the thread!
Urgent note to the mods: the next person who signs up as a member here MUST be required to take this as her username. If she refuses, --ban her, dammit! For the obvious reason that she is not worthy of being a Doper.
And if it’s a male, he can be “Lewis Carmen Denominator”.
Mass mailers are machine stupid. I used to be based at “The Alexandra Hospital”. We regularly receive junk mail addressed to Miss/Ms Alexandra Hospital.
Well, probably the most famous one was the authors of a book about the TV show Mr. Ed, who included the “fact” that the horse that played Mr. Ed was actually a zebra.
When that appeared as a question and answer in Trivial Pursuit, they sued.
Reportedly they lost, with the court ruling that facts cannot be copyrighted, even if they are false.
I think you’re misremembering. That wasn’t from a book, that was Snopes.
That’s not true. The Feist court said that raw information cannot be copyrighted, not that copyright traps are of “no legal use.” A copyright trap is still useful on a map, for example, since maps include creative work such as icons. They’re just not useful in a phone book, since telephone listings include nothing other than bare information.
Here it is on snopes. If you haven’t read it, you absolutely need to read this. It is masterful. It had me going for a while, until it threw in some other facts that didn’t quite seem right.
It was a trivia book and the trap was that Colombo’s first name is Phillip. Although no one mentions his name, a picture of his police ID show his name as Frank.
But all a copyright trap adds to a map is raw information. All the elements that are eligible for copyright are present on all the other features as well.
I’ve noticed that in phone books with old hospitals. Our phone book has a listing for a hospital that was torn down in 1989. I’ve noticed it in other city phone books as well. Hospitals with listings that physically don’t exist anymore.
I’m not sure that’s true from a legal standpoint (despite the court ruling). If I add to my work something that I know not to be true like Colombo’s first name being Philip or the town of Zyx on a map, it’s not a fact but rather a creative work and copying THAT should be a copyright violation even if copying the rest of the book/map is not.
Sure. But the trap makes it easier to prove that the other elements are copied rather than coincidentally similar.
Concert tapers used to do something like this. Most of them traded tapes through the mail, and didn’t like commercial bootleggers profiting from their recordings. So every person that they traded with got a unique version edited slightly different from the others, so if a commercial bootleg appeared in stores, they’d know exactly who it was that leaked their tape.
I put one in a book I wrote, mostly just for kicks. In a quote from court testimony, I changed the wording in a slight way that didn’t alter the meaning but that I would remember. I figured if someone else was lifting the copy from my book instead of doing their own research, I’d have a gotcha.
The trap actually appeared in a newspaper story years later. The trap was moot, however, because it was just a couple words in a very long “investigative” piece about the subject of my book. The reporter apparently had propped up my book and typed entire pages verbatim without ever mentioning the book.
I had a few words with her boss.
Read Feist again. Facts are simply not copyrightable, even false facts.