For those of you who don’t know, Lillian can be found on page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. What the entry says is not important. What is important is that she doesn’t exist. She is put in to protect the encyclopedia’s copyright. If someone were to copy the entry then it would be clear that they are stealing it.
I picked Lillian because I am getting all my information from the August 29, 2005 edition of the New Yorker. For your amusement, in the same article it says that the New Oxford American Dictionary contains the made-up word “esquivalience”, which means the willful avoidance of one’s offical responsibilities. The word has been previously spotted on Dictionary.com.
I know that TSD has had trouble with other websites stealling Cecil’s columns and passsing the Great One’s knowledge as their own. If this website does not already have a fake Cecil column, it can be a potential solution to copyright theft. The SDMB would still have to be notified of the fake column of course, that is, if they are unable to spot it for themselves.
Maybe I’m slow today, but I don’t quite see the point. The vast majority of the people who steal Cecil’s Columns and the Staff Reports don’t even bother to hide their effort, they just copy and paste the entire thing verbatim. They’re incredibly easy to find with Google.
Nor do they copy the site entirely, which would be necessary to find such a thing. Everybody stealing Cecil articles I’ve run across (which is an extensive list) merely swipes a few stories of special interest to themself.
