Say I hash your movie and my hash is modulo 16. Do you now own the number that happens to come out? How can you prove that it was your movie that generated the hash and not some other piece of data?
Copyright is simply a question of source. Unlike patents, it’s very possible for two independent people to come up with the exact same sentence and those people to independently own copyrights to the exact same words. Proving independent creation may be difficult, but it’s still possible.
Similarly, proving where something comes from can be difficult, but let’s not pretend people are independently coming up with 100’s of bit hashes.
PS: As to ownership, both the creator of a derivative work and the creator of the original source have specific rights which in theory expire at different times. Fair use exceptions can also supersede those rights.
> Unlike patents, it’s very possible for two independent people to come up with the exact same sentence and those people to independently own copyrights to the exact same words. Proving independent creation may be difficult, but it’s still possible.
In cases where this is possible, it's often not possible to hold a copyright over the phrase for reasons of lack of creativity. The main difficulty isn't proving independent creation, it's proving that a third party didn't also come up with the phrase independently.
> Copyright is simply a question of source. Unlike patents, it’s very possible for two independent people to come up with the exact same sentence and those people to independently own copyrights to the exact same words.
