Summary: "Illegal number" is a term that you use to refer to protected digital information when you also want to convey that you have no grasp of the legal issues involved.
Let's have a thread about it then. What legal issues am I misunderstanding? It seems to me that the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are rather unprecedented.
Brandenburg v. Ohio demonstrated that free speech protects abstract advocacy of force or law violation. The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright. That could be a small number, a key, or even a description of how a DRM scheme operates.
I cannot imagine a constitutional basis for those provisions of the DMCA. What say you?
> The anti-circumvention provisions criminalize the distribution of not just software that can be directly used, but anything that serves as a tool to violate copyright.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm going to speculate that if you upload image.bmp, a picture you took with your camera, that happens by coincidence to contain a key that can be used for circumvention, then you would not be prosecuted or convicted. In other words, it's not the number that's illegal.
I'm not speaking about accidental violation of the provision, I'm even talking about intentional violation. Anti-circumvention provisions don't cover the copyrighted work, they don't even cover a derivative work. It's just suppression of speech that tangentially supports or encourages illegal activities, which the Supreme Court has ruled the government has no compelling interest in quelling.
A lot of this speech can take many forms. It can be blog posts delving into how some encryption scheme works, it can be keys that are derived mathematically from Sony's mistakes, and it can be software which may only incidentally be used as a tool to circumvent DRM. This does not survive strict scrutiny.
I would argue that a secret key by itself does not qualify as a circumvention tool and thus should not be banned by the DMCA. Unfortunately, by my reading the law does not agree with me and specifically bans distribution of a circumvention "device, component, or part thereof"; it seems like a key is a part of a circumvention device.
Looking at circumvention code itself, I would argue that such code should have no artistic or political expression when boiled down to its functional essence, in which case there is no meaningful free speech issue. If the code did have artistic or political aspects, arguably those aspects could be separated from the part of the code which performs circumvention. For example, the political opinion of being opposed to the DMCA can be easily expressed without using any code.
Having read the article, I'm not sure if this summary is satirical or not. On the one hand, it sounds like it could be a relevant summary of his point, on the other hand it sounds like you're saying the author has no grasp of the legal issues involved.
It sounds to me like he's saying that the author of the "Illegal number" article has no grasp of the legal (or philosophical) issues involved, not that the author of the "What color are your bits?" article has no grasp of it.
The author of that article specifically made a point of not calling either side "right" or "wrong"; the article just exists to help both sides understand the worldview of the other. Whichever mindset you hold, understanding the other mindset will help you make more effective arguments that don't sound inherently insane.
From the perspective of the law, bits do have color, even though that makes no sense from a technical perspective. So, any given number may or may not qualify as "illegal" depending on how you generated it. That said, I don't think that makes the terms "illegal number" or "illegal prime" nonsensical, depending on context.
In any case, I think the article doesn't deserve the pithy "summary" upthread; the summary provides actively unhelpful information if you haven't read the article.
My summary was snarky, but "illegal number" is a silly term intended to emphasize that "it's just a number (so how could it be illegal?)", which is as sophisticated as the legal arguments "it's just a plastic disk with certain reflective properties" or "it's just some markings on a piece of paper."
Your claim that bits having color "makes no sense from a technical perspective" sounds like more geek misunderstanding to me. There is no technical problem here -- only a problem of geeks applying technical results where they shouldn't.
Your claim that bits having color "makes no sense from a technical perspective" sounds like more geek misunderstanding to me. There is no technical problem here -- only a problem of geeks applying technical results where they shouldn't.
How dare you suggest that geeks and their rationality are not the rightful masters of the universe?
You've described one side of the debate, yes. The technical side has no less merit; don't dismiss it offhandedly. Hence why I find the essay on bits having color so useful: it frames the debate nicely without actually taking a side.
The arguments you referenced would indeed make for relatively unsophisticated legal arguments, but they don't claim to be legal arguments; they're statements about technology and about how geeks want technology to work. They carry no less weight than statements about how lawyers want technology to work.
Or, to put it more snarkily: your claim that bits have some unrepresentable property of "color" sounds like non-geek misunderstanding to me. There is no legal problem here -- only a problem of non-geeks applying legalistic results where they shouldn't. :)
Let's not rehash the arguments that the essay already eloquently expresses; neither of us will get anywhere that way.
We apparently had different interpretations of the color article. You seem to think the article was about there being two valid viewpoints (color exists and it doesn't), whereas I think it was just about trying to get the computer scientist to understand color.
> Or, to put it more snarkily: your claim that bits have some unrepresentable property of "color" sounds like non-geek misunderstanding to me.
The legality of information should and does involve tracking how they were obtained. This is not a property of mathematical bits, but is a property of the physical encoding of those bits in this world. Since the argument here is over how the law should work, a geek making arguments like this is just wrong. This is not a "they're both right" situation.
> Let's not rehash the arguments that the essay already eloquently expresses; neither of us will get anywhere that way.
Go reread the essay and see if you can really find support for your viewpoint. I just skimmed it (quickly, admittedly) and it seems to say what I remembered it to say.
> Since the argument here is over how the law should work
I think we've talked past each other here. I agree with you about how the law works. As much as I might want it to work differently, it currently does not. However, read the second to last paragraph of the essay: "I think it's time for computer people to take Colour more seriously - if only so that we can better explain to the lawyers why they must give up their dream of enforcing Colour inside Friend Computer, where Colour does not and cannot exist." That one sentence nicely sums up both viewpoints: the law wants bits to have color, and technology does not support properties of bits beyond the bits themselves. You've argued the former, which I agree with. I've argued the latter, and you seem to think that in doing so I've disagreed with the former.
> whereas I think it was just about trying to get the computer scientist to understand color.
I'd argue that the same article would also help lawyers understand why technology cannot represent the color of bits.
In any case, I think the sentence I quoted above makes both viewpoints very clear. And while I recognize that the law sees bits as having color, I intend to continue working to make sure technology does not attempt to care.
I think the few bits about lawyers not understanding the limitations of metadata weren't the thrust of the article. I do agree that the two viewpoints there aren't opposed, but that point about metadata is not the same as the wrong headed one being made by people using the phrase "illegal number."
The only thing that makes the "illegal number" view wrong headed is a belief that the law as currently on the books has the final say on what is ethically/factually/morally/intellectually right and wrong.
I believe you are too hard on those who disagree with you, as you don't seem to acknowledge that those who disagree with the law's desire to stamp a color on everything have valid reasons for their disagreement.
Can you point me to a coherent presentation of the alternative possibility? The only alternatives I see are that either A) there are legally protected (uncolored) numbers, or B) there is no legally protected information at all.
I don't think option A is coherent. In fact most use of the phrase "illegal number" is by people who are attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument against the legal system (but don't understand color). But note that as a practical matter, we do have protected numbers. Good luck convincing a court that you produced an identical text to the last Harry Potter novel through any means other than copying.
Option B, the anarchistic approach, is no doubt consistent but would be a radical change from our present form of copyright.
It's my understanding from watching the DeCSS fiasco unfold that the "illegal number" phrase was coined to mock the DMCA's criminalization of circumvention tools, and the first illegal numbers described were various representations of DeCSS. I don't think that position is unreasonable or wrong headed at all.
You are right that, when applied to actual copyrighted materials, the only obvious options are A: "We'll voluntarily submit to the legal fiction that bits have color (or at least shades of gray) in the form of copyright law, because we can see some benefit to doing so," and B: "We believe that a society whose rules can be fully justified by concrete logic, evolutionary morality, and the laws of physics is preferable to a society founded upon legal fictions, and abolition of the concept of intellectual property follows from this."
However, I believe a good number of people hold position C: "We believe copyright law has significantly overstepped its useful bounds, and will pretend to hold position B in order to achieve a reasonable compromise."
Even your use of the phrase "... the legal fiction that bits have color ..." sounds silly to me. Compare that phrase to "... the legal fiction that bicycles have an invisible ownership property ..." to see why. The entirety of the law is about similar fictions.
The idea that someone owns the part of my brain that has been indelibly imprinted with their copyrighted expression sounds silly to me.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. -Thomas Jefferson
Ideas are fundamentally different from bicycles. One cannot share a bicycle indefinitely without each user having proportionally less access. One can share bits and ideas. Show me where in silicon the color of a bit is stored. The entire concept of colorful bits is a fabricatiion of the human imagination, not a fundamental property of the universe. The atoms comprising a bicycle, on the other hand, can indeed be under the control of the atoms comprising a human being, to the physical exclusion of others.
Ownership of a bicycle isn't about physically controlling the bicycle. It's about the path of the bicycle through space-time, which is exactly how color operates -- it tracks the flow of information through space-time. There is no physical aspect of a bicycle that controls ownership. It's color, just like with bits.
I'm sure we both understand well enough the trade-offs that society makes in granting copyrights. Reasonable people have differing opinions, but these trade-offs existed long before computers, which have only shifted the balance of the bargain. The fact that bits encode information as numbers is irrelevant to the discussion.
