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Have you seen the New York Times article on CS cheating at Stanford? Here it is.

I wonder if SO should have copy-and-paste traps like the kind used on New York magazine's site. When a user copies text from a site with a trap, the text will paste with a note explaining where it comes from. E.g.:

Albany needs a new novelist. William Kennedy's books are brilliant, but his ghosts and gangsters roam a state capitol that's been gone at least six decades. Capturing the surdity that has reigned since Eliot Spitzer arrived as governor, and that reached new nonsensical heights this week, calls for a Hudson Valley version of Carl Hiaasen.

Read more: Chris Smith: What We’ve Learned From the Paterson Circus — Daily Intel

This would only foil the most bumbling cheaters, but it would be interesting to see how often the little tag would show up.

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Like Robert answered: it might help people to easily provide proper attribution (and copyright information) to Stack Overflow et al, if something is copied from one of the trilogy sites. That might be nice! (And, if it would exist, then for the trilogy users there's no more excuse not to include such reference, when copying answers from one question to another.) By the way: I like the highlighting. –  Arjan Feb 12 '10 at 17:28
    
I couldn't reproduce this when I tried (visit the article, CMD-C, CMD-V - Mac 10.6, Chrome 14). I don't have any sources, but it seems they've stopped doing this. –  Kevin Vermeer Oct 18 '11 at 20:25

1 Answer 1

It's not really Stack Overflow's place to "trap" the content of the system from copying. Quite the opposite. All content on Stack Overflow is freely available and explicitly licensed under cc-wiki for copying and reuse.

The only possible benefit of adding text to copied content is to help the recipient provide proper attribution.

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