Fictitious entry

Terminology

Copyright traps

Official sources

Maps

• In 1978, the fictional American towns of Beatosu and Goblu in Ohio were inserted into that year's official state of Michigan map as nods to the University of Michigan and its traditional rival, The Ohio State University.
• The fictional American town of Agloe, New York, was invented by map makers, but eventually became identified as a real place by its county administration because a building, the Agloe General Store, was erected at its fictional location. The "town" is featured in the novel Paper Towns by John Green and its film adaptation.
• Mount Richard, a fictitious peak on the continental divide in the United States, appeared on county maps in the early 1970s. It was believed to be the work of a draftsman, Richard Ciacci. The fiction was undiscovered for two years.
• In the United Kingdom in 2001, the Ordnance Survey obtained a £20m out-of-court settlement from Automobile Association after content from OS maps was reproduced on AA maps. The Ordnance Survey denied that it included "deliberate mistakes" in its maps as copyright traps, claiming the "fingerprints" which identified a copy were stylistic features such as the width of roads.
• The 2002 Geographers A-Z Map of Manchester contains traps. For example, Dickinson Street in central Manchester is falsely named “Philpott St”
• The fictitious English town of Argleton was investigated by Steve Punt in an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme Punt P.I. The programme concluded that the town's entry may well have originated as a copyright trap.

Trivia books, etc.

• The Trivia Encyclopedia placed deliberately false information about the first name of TV detective Columbo for copy-trap purposes and then sued Trivial Pursuit, without success.

  Other copyright infringement

• In the summer of 2008, the state-owned Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute became suspicious that a competing commercial service, the website meteo.sk, was stealing their data. On 7 August 2008, SHMÚ deliberately altered the temperature for Chopok from 9.5 °C to 1 °C. In a short time, the temperature of 1 °C appeared for Chopok at meteo.sk as well.
• The ANP in the Netherlands once deliberately included a false story about a fire in their radio newscast to see if Radio Veronica took its news from the ANP. Several hours later, Radio Veronica also aired the story.
• Google, alleging its search results for a misspelling of tarsorrhaphy started appearing in Bing results partway through the summer of 2010, created fabricated search results where a hundred query terms like "hiybbprqag", "delhipublicschool40 chdjob" and "juegosdeben1ogrande" each returned a link to a single unrelated webpage. Nine of the hundred fraudulent results planted by Google were later observed as the first result for the bogus term on Bing.

  Scrutiny checks

Humorous hoaxes

Practical jokes

• Rhinogradentia are a fictitious mammalian order, extensively documented in a series of articles and books by the equally fictitious German naturalist Harald Stümpke. Allegedly, both the animals and the scientist were the creations of Gerolf Steiner, a zoology professor at the University of Heidelberg.
• Taro Tsujimoto is a fictional character often included in Buffalo Sabres reference works. Tsujimoto, an alleged Japanese forward, was the creation of Sabres general manager George "Punch" Imlach designed to fool the National Hockey League during the 1974 NHL amateur draft; Imlach drafted Tsujimoto and only months later—well after the pick was made official—admitted that the league had been fooled by the fictitious player.
• Franz Bibfeldt is a fictitious theologian created by Robert Howard Clausen for a footnote in a student paper. Bibfeldt was later popularized by Clausen's classmate Martin Marty as an ongoing in-joke among theologians, including a book and a parody lecture series at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
• At least two sports teams at Georgia Tech have long included George P. Burdell, a fictitious student originally created as a practical joke by a Tech student in 1927, in their lists of lettermen in team media guides:
• *Football: Lists Burdell as a letterman in the 1928, 1929, and 1930 seasons.
• *Men's basketball: Lists Burdell as a letterman in the 1955–56, 1956–57, and 1957–58 seasons.

  Puzzles/games

• Australian palaeontologist Tim Flannery's book Astonishing Animals includes one imaginary animal and leaves it up to the reader to distinguish which one it is.
• The product catalogue for Swedish consumer electronics and hobby articles retailer Teknikmagasinet contains a fictitious product. Finding that product is a contest, Blufftävlingen, in which the best suggestion for another fictitious product from someone who spotted the product gets included in the next issue.
• Muse, a US magazine for children 10–14, regularly includes a two-page spread containing science and technology news. One of the news stories is false and readers are encouraged to guess which one.
• Games used to include a fake advertisement in each issue as one of the magazine's regular games.
• The book The Golden Turkey Awards describes many bizarre and obscure films. The authors of the work state that one film described by the book is a complete hoax, and they challenge readers to spot the made-up film; the imaginary film was Dog of Norway, which supposedly starred "Muki the Wonder Dog", named after the authors' own dog

  Fictitious entries in fiction

• A Fred Saberhagen science fiction short story, "The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron", in which an encyclopedia article for a star system is a fictitious entry included in the encyclopedia to detect plagiarism, which causes a Berserker ship to end up in an empty star system where it runs out of fuel and ceases to be a threat to humanity.
• Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" tells of an encyclopedia entry on what turns out to be the imaginary country of Uqbar. This leads the narrator to the equally fantastic region of Tlön, the setting for much of the country's literature.
• The fictitious entry Agloe, New York, is a key plot point in John Green's 2008 novel Paper Towns and its film adaptation. Paper Towns also references the fictitious entry "Lillian Mountweazel" in the name of the Spiegelman family's dog, Myrna Mountweazel.
• In the Inside No. 9 episode "Misdirection", Mountweazel is used to prove the plagiarism of a magic trick.
• In the Doctor Who episode "Face the Raven", a hidden community lives in a London alley. Clara Oswald helps the Doctor start the search for that community by searching for any trap streets within the London city limits.

  Legal action

• Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. He claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game's Genus Edition had been taken from his books, even his own fictitious entries that he had added to the books to catch anyone who wanted to violate his copyright. However, the case was thrown out by the district court judge as the Trivial Pursuit inventors argued that facts are not protected by copyright.
• In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., a New York Corporation which published and sold Official New York Taxi Driver's Guide sued Hagstrom Map Corporation for publishing and selling New York City Taxi & Limousine Drivers Guide, alleging violation of the Copyright Act of 1976. A United States Federal Court found that Nester's selection of addresses involved a sufficient level of creativity to be eligible for copyright and enjoined Hagstrom from copying that portion of the guide. However, the court also found that fictitious entries are not themselves protected by copyright.
• In Alexandria Drafting Co. v. Andrew H. Amsterdam dba Franklin Maps, Alexandria Drafting Corporation filed suit against Franklin Maps alleging that Franklin Maps had violated the Copyright Act of 1976 by copying their map books. However, this case was dismissed although the judge cited that there was a single instance of original copyright, but this was not sufficient evidence to support copyright infringement. Additionally the judge cited Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co. as previous case law to support that "fictitious names may not be copyrighted" and "the existence, or non-existence, of a road is a non-copyrightable fact."
• In one particular case, in 2001 The Automobile Association in the United Kingdom agreed to settle a case for £20,000,000 when it was caught copying Ordnance Survey maps. However, in this copyright infringement case there was no instance of a purposeful copyright trap. Instead, the prosecution sued for specific stylistic choices, such as the width and style of the roads.

  Simple errors

Fictitious entries on Wikipedia