Over two decades ago, the New Oxford American Dictionary wanted to see if any of its competitors were cribbing its definitions. So it set up a trap. In its first edition, published in 2001, NOAD included a word called “esquivalience,” which it defined as the “willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.”

The word was a fake. And the bait worked: the word reference website Dictionary.com was caught using “esquivalience,” attributing it to Merriam Webster’s New Millennium. Its guilt was undeniable, and the debacle gained considerable media coverage.

These copyright traps have a name: “mountweazels” — a term with its own curious history — and an evolution of them is now being used by companies fending off AI data scrapers that devour vast swathes of the internet without asking perm

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