Probably any cryptographic hash function would have done. My suspicion is that what they're trying to do here is similar to e.g. the "Readium LCP" DRM for eboo

Probably any cryptographic hash function would have done. My suspicion is that what they're trying to do here is similar to e.g. the "Readium LCP" DRM for ebooks (previously discussed at [1]): A "secret key" and a "proprietary algorithm" might possibly bring this into DMCA scope in a way that using only a copyrighted string might not. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378627