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If I were to reproduce a large amount of text (e.g. from a book), generate a hash value of it, and then use the hash value in e.g. the source code of a software (as an integer, that has to be truncated due to limitations in the number of bits that can be used), would this infringe on the copyright of the original work?

The same applies to trademarks, if I were to reproduce the names (e.g. of movies, TV series, video games) instead.

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  • Whether your use of copyright protected material infringes the copyright depends in part on the purpose for which you are using it. There isn't enough information here to address that element. A hash of a trademark only infringes the trademark if it confuses consumers. This seems unlikely.
    – phoog
    Commented Jun 8 at 18:45

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Trademarks shouldn't be a problem, so long as they don't induce anyone to think you're affiliated with the trademark (which seems rather unlikely if you're merely embedding a hash of an encoded version of a name into source code; it would take significant effort for a user to even detect that.)

I don't think using the hash would itself violate copyright. A hash cannot really be called a work of authorship, and thus is not really a derivative work (just like the word count of a book is not a "derivative work" even though it's derived from the work.) The hash would presumably not be reversible, and thus it could not be used to generate an infringing copy.

But there's a problem with this step:

If I were to reproduce a large amount of text (e.g. from a book)

To generate the hash in the first place, you're making a copy of a large amount of the work! This itself is infringing unless you have an exception. I'm not sure whether you could claim fair use here. Your use won't affect the market for the original, which is in your favor, but another prong is whether the amount you copied was necessary... and it seems to me that the entire use is unnecessary.

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  • I think if you (or, realistically, a lawyer) could make an argument that a hash of the entire work was necessary, then it follows that copying the entire work would be necessary, because you cannot make a hash of the entire work by copying only part of the work.
    – David Z
    Commented Jun 10 at 7:58
  • @DavidZ I guess it depends on why you need a hash of the work in your source code. I was imagining someone doing it on a whim, but maybe there's a reason?
    – D M
    Commented Jun 10 at 11:17

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