Illegal number

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Free Speech flag, from the HD DVD AACS
case

An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some

legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.[1][2][3]

Background

A number may represent some type of

Blu-ray Disc released before this date. The issuers of a series of cease-and-desist letters claim that the key itself is therefore a copyright circumvention device,[4] and that publishing the key violates Title 1 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act
.

In part of the DeCSS court order[5] and in the AACS legal notices, the claimed protection for these numbers is based on their mere possession and the value or potential use of the numbers. This makes their status and legal issues surrounding their distribution quite distinct from that of copyright infringement.[5]

The PlayStation 3 edition of the free speech flag

Any image file or an executable program[6] can be regarded as simply a very large binary number. In certain jurisdictions, there are images that are illegal to possess,[7] due to obscenity or secrecy/classified status, so the corresponding numbers could be illegal.[1][8]

In 2011 Sony sued George Hotz and members of fail0verflow for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3.[9] Part of the lawsuit complaint was that they had published PS3 keys. Sony also threatened to sue anyone who distributed the keys.[10] Sony later accidentally retweeted an older dongle key through its fictional Kevin Butler character.[11]

Flags and steganography

The word "Wikipedia" translated into colors via hex codes

As a protest of the DeCSS case, many people created "

free speech flag" was created. Some illegal numbers are so short that a simple flag (shown in the image) could be created by using triples of components as describing red-green-blue
colors. The argument is that if short numbers can be made illegal, then any representation of those numbers also becomes illegal, like simple patterns of colors, etc.

In the

Sony Computer Entertainment v. Hotz case, many bloggers (including one at Yale Law School) made a "new free speech flag" in homage to the AACS free speech flag. Most of these were based on the "dongle key" rather than the keys Hotz actually released.[12] Several users of other websites posted similar flags.[13]

Illegal primes

An illegal prime is an illegal number which is also

binary representation corresponds to a compressed version of the C source code of a computer program implementing the DeCSS decryption algorithm, which can be used by a computer to circumvent a DVD's copy protection.[14]

Protests against the indictment of DeCSS author

primality of a number is a fundamental property of number theory
and is therefore not dependent on legal definitions of any particular jurisdiction.

The large prime database of the

elliptic curve primality proving (ECPP) algorithm
. Thus, if the number were large enough and proved prime using ECPP, it would be published.

Other examples

There are other contexts in which smaller numbers have run afoul of laws or regulations, or drawn the attention of authorities.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Carmody, Phil. "An Executable Prime Number?". Retrieved December 30, 2018. Maybe I was reading something between the lines that wasn't there, but if arbitrary programs could be expressed as primes, the immediate conclusion is that all programs, including ones some people wished didn't exist, can too. I.e. the so called 'circumvention devices' of which my previous prime exploit was an example.
  2. ^ Greene, Thomas C. (March 19, 2001). "DVD descrambler encoded in 'illegal' prime number". The Register. Retrieved December 30, 2018. The question, of course, is whether an interesting number is illegal merely because it can be used to encode a contraband program.
  3. ^ "The Prime Glossary: illegal prime". Retrieved December 30, 2018. The bottom line: If distributing code is illegal, and these numbers contain (or are) the code, doesn't that make these number illegal?
  4. ^ "AACS licensor complains of posted key". Lumen. April 17, 2007. Retrieved December 30, 2018. Illegal Offering of Processing Key to Circumvent AACS Copyright Protection [...] are thereby providing and offering to the public a technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof that is primarily designed, produced, or marketed for the purpose of circumventing the technological protection measures afforded by AACS (hereafter, the "circumvention offering"). Doing so constitutes a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "DMCA")
  5. ^ a b "Memorandum Order, in MPAA v. Reimerdes, Corley and Kazan". February 2, 2000. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  6. ^ "Prime Curios: 48565...29443 (1401-digits)". Retrieved December 30, 2018. What folks often forget is a program (any file actually) is a string of bits (binary digits)—so every program is a number.
  7. ^ "Criminal Justice Act 1988". Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  8. ISBN 9781118045718
    .
  9. ^ Patel, Nilay (January 12, 2011). "Sony follows up, officially sues Geohot and fail0verflow over PS3 jailbreak". Engadget. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  10. ^ Kravets, David (February 8, 2011). "Sony lawyers now targeting anyone who posts PlayStation 3 hack". Ars Technica. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  11. ^ Miller, Ross (February 9, 2011). "PS3 'jailbreak code' retweeted by Sony's Kevin Butler, no punchline needed". Engadget. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  12. ^ S., Ben (March 1, 2011). "46-dc-ea-d3-17-fe-45-d8-09-23-eb-97-e4-95-64-10-d4-cd-b2-c2". Yale Law Tech. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  13. ^ See File:Free-speech-flag-ps3.svg description.
  14. ^ "Prime glossary - Illegal prime". Primes.utm.edu. 1999-10-06. Retrieved 2013-03-26.
  15. ^ Hamilton, David P. "Banned Code Lives in Poetry and Song"
  16. ^ MacKinnon, Mark (June 4, 2012). "Banned in China on Tiananmen anniversary: 6, 4, 89 and 'today'". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  17. ^ Meyer, Jeremy P. (September 5, 2012). "Greeley school ban on gang numbers includes Peyton Manning's 18". The Denver Post. Retrieved December 30, 2018.
  18. ^ "Police charge leader of Slovak far-right party with extremism". Reuters. July 28, 2017. Retrieved December 30, 2018.

External links

Look up illegal number in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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