"Illegal number" is a loaded term designed to point out the ridiculousness of certain copyrights.
However, I've always found this odd. Since pretty much any information can be conveyed as a number, why aren't people complaining about the UTF-8 encoding of Harry Potter being an illegal number? Why does this term seem limited to crypto/DRM?
The argument that "it's just numbers" was considered insipid 20 years ago. There's a Dilbert where Wally says "I was just transmitting 1s and 0s, it's your computer that is really at fault for encoding them into <whatever the thing that got him into trouble with HR>." We are, of course, not meant to take Wally's argument seriously.
I could encode my inciting of a mob to violence as a prime number. No one, least of all HN, should accept this argument that "it's just a number."
The thing about the illegal prime wasn't so much that it's "just a number", rather that it would be archived and published independently because it's a novel prime for mathematical value, not for the purpose of breaking DRM, hence providing an interesting test to free speech law (can you really say that a specific prime cannot be published in a list of primes simply because it happens to represent DeCSS's source code?)
The law is full of contradictions. Pointing out an inconsistency is not a victory[1]. One principle or the other will lose, and the one that loses might be yours.
I suppose so. However I don't think many people are really going to try that one, especially given the US Govt, while perhaps lenient on the DeCSS prime, would probably not be quite so lenient on a child porn prime. It's also just against basic human morality, really.
It's reductionist nonsense, just as much as it's nonsense to say that certain weapons are an "illegal arrangement of atoms" or poisoning someone is an "illegal sequence of chemical reactions" or weaponized anthrax is an "illegal sequence of DNA."
NB: I'm not in favor of making certain kinds of encryption illegal, or DeCSS like tools. I'm also not in favor of making the meat-space equivalent, burglars' tools, illegal. There's nothing special about numbers.
I know illegal number exist, the primes here are different beasts and that's the subject title. If we're going to discuss illegal numbers in general then that's (in my opinion a worthy subject) off-topic for this thread.
Any illegal content can be represented as a number, that's not all that special. Illegal primes took some work to create.
I'm not usually fond of the argument that "all data is just numbers so copyright is invalid" (cue the "color of your bits
" article) but I must say this is pretty clever.
I wonder if you could extend this principle by writing a program that would extract copyrighted material from public domain work.
Like, you write a program that would take text as an input, apply a transformation and output the result. If you input the bible, you get the source code to DeCSS. Is this code illegal? I don't think you could fill a DMCA against the bible...
If you have enough people you can establish a religion that treats a certain binary number (which also happens to represent an arbitrary algorithm) as a sacred text.
Right, and that's what is interesting about the OP.
They found a piece of information that is notable in its own right (by being one of the larger primes discovered through a particular algorithm). This single piece of information, without any further interpretation, can executed in order to perform the illegal DeCSS operation. IOW, somebody tells you that it's the Nth largest number proven prime by {mumble], and you copy that number out of the math book into an executable file, run it, and you're a criminal.
Only if you could do that by some meaningful and simple process. If you simply generate a table (of the same length as the source code) that produces the source code when added to the bible, that's just basic cryptography, a sort of indirect way to store the source code.
Nah, what I'm proposing is steganography not cryptography. Encode it hidden within the text in terms of word lengths, comma positions, number of commas per sentence, word capitalisation, or some other property like that:
The prime itself is kind of useless. What is useful is the number, plus the instructions about what to do with it, how to run it, how to apply it.
This is similar to saying "Book is just a collection of letters, but you can distribute the actual letters one by one and it's allright, isn't copyright absurd?".
You're right, the "it's just a number" argument doesn't hold up. What's interesting in this case though, is that it's not just any other number, but a prime of mathematical relevance.
It's a copyrighted algorithmic composition that contains most, if not all international phone numbers. They conveniently supply a form so that you can gain a license to use your phone number if it is in the composition.
The coolest thing about this is it actually works. You can go ahead and copy the number out of the wikipedia page put it into a python prompt convert it to binary write it to a file and decompress it. Pretty awesome!
Why prime? Is that because they're remarkable? Then any number would do since all numbers are remarkable (otherwise if there was a (set of) non-remarkable numbers, there would be a smallest one, hence it'd be remarkable itself, and so on).
I think it is because primes are widely accepted as remarkable. They are seen as things you discover - you don't invent them.
The fact that they have practical application is important too. Do we really want a legal system where you have to get clearances from the MPAA to make ship building software, for instance?
However, I've always found this odd. Since pretty much any information can be conveyed as a number, why aren't people complaining about the UTF-8 encoding of Harry Potter being an illegal number? Why does this term seem limited to crypto/DRM?