Copyright trap

A copyright trap is usually a fake entry in one's original work, designed to trap copycats. If their work also has the fake entry, that means they copied your work - how else would they have the same fake information?

This technique can take many forms. A mapmaker can include a non-existent street or town. A dictionary can have fake words, while a telephone book could have fake phone numbers. A book could reference academic articles, facts or experts that don't exist.

(There are other cool, related instances like people who make rugs manually sometimes purposefully add a tiny flaw, to prove the rug was created by hand, not by a machine. Will something similar happen to writing – adding elements that the reader could fairly reliably assume an AI would not add?)

Elon Musk famously used a related technique, a canary trap, to find a Tesla leaker:

• Wikipedia