Illegal Numbers

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.

This is an interesting problem that we, as a society, need to deal with.

HN's readership would be predominantly from a tech background with probably a reasonable basis in mathematics and the sciences. As such we can recognize some of the absurdities of the legal system, like how you can't patent a mathematical formula but you can patent software, which is ultimately indistinguishable from a formula in many (if not all?) cases.

The question is naturally asked: if I make some number produce something illegal is that number then illegal? The engineers among us like absolute rules and certainty as a general rule. I've had a discussion with someone else about how a group of people could route each other's packets and then hypothetically law enforcement couldn't prove who they came from. The same argument comes up with "an IP address is not a person" arguments.

While I sympathize with these arguments, this isn't how the legal system works. The law doesn't work on absolutely provable certainty. It works on reasonable doubt, intent and (hopefully) facts.

So when it comes to numbers, one has to remember that numbers encode information (See [1]). So for a small integer to encode, say, an obscene image or a program that circumvents copy protection, it would require another program that actually does that. So if the number 7 produced a DeCSS circumvention program with a given program A, then program A is the problem, not the number 7.

Now to turn any number into a video or a program or an image requires another program or infrastructure. Even if it's juaw the raw bytes of an i386/ELF program, you still need a kernel and a filesystem to run it. The test here, as I imagine the law would apply (IANAL), is whether the required infrastructure is general purpose or not.

Turning the number 7 into something obscene can't be done with something general purpose. Turning a 1400 digit number into a program can.

I don't like the stance of the US on IP, particularly the Obama administration, which has to be the most pro-IP anti-tech administration in US history (IMHO). I also don't like how selective enforcement is here. Share a few songs on Limewire and you'd up for hundreds of thousands of dollars? Really? At the same time, every city has a place you can go to buy pirate DVDs or counterfeit goods (eg Canal St in NYC). Why is this, which is actual trafficking for profit, ignored while the administration tries to elevate file-sharing to terrorism (the original ACTA draft)?

Anyway, numbers are simply a way to represent information and that information is the problem, not the number.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

I don't speak binary very well, so correct me if I'm wrong on this subject. If a number that represents illegal information is formed, that number is illegal. What if there is a larger number that has the illegal number in it? Example: 10 is illegal. 1000 has the number ten in it. The "10" can be filtered out.. How would this be handled?

The main problem with "illegal numbers" seems to be that for any illegal number a, which represents someone's intellectual property or trade secret A, I can easily create two original pieces of intellectual property B and C so that b + c = a.

What truly matter is intent. If you are trying to convey the illegal number, you are trying to break the law. If you accidentally transmit the bits that form the number while transmitting something else, you are not culpable.

Obligatory IANAL.