Apparently by creating fake results they've published something "creative" and thus potentially able to be copywrited. Just speculation but interesting.
The Reddit commentator appears to be operating on the idea that trap streets and the like are copyrightable under US law, which is a fairly common urban legend.
In reality adding a fake "fact" to a collection of real facts does not allow you to sue someone if they copy the fake fact along with the real facts; from the decision in Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., treating "'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated"
The guy's phone book example is wrong, though. Putting fake entries in a phone book does not make it subject to copyright. Google or Bing for "Feist vs. Rural Telephone" for the leading case in the US on this.
>Apparently by creating fake results they've published something "creative" and thus potentially able to be copywrited. Just speculation but interesting.
And then given Bing explicit permission to copy it by accepting the terms and conditions of the Bing toolbar while installing it.
If you repeat the experiment with 2 made up results instead of just one but clicked on only the 2nd one, only the 2nd one would show up and not the first. They are copying the user action(for which they got permission), not the results directly.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fd3g9/google_bi...
Apparently by creating fake results they've published something "creative" and thus potentially able to be copywrited. Just speculation but interesting.