Harry Potter isn't illegal, you're just violating copyright if you distribute it.

However I believe the DMCA makes DRM circumention itself illegal, hence DeCSS itself is illegal.

That's my understanding at least.

Fair enough. Would child porn be a valid comparison then? It's illegal to possess child porn. So should this reasoning fly?

"Sir, this is NOT a pornographic image featuring a minor, it's just a very large number!"

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.

[1] http://xkcd.com/651/

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.

Yes, in the same way that a knife is "just a bunch of atoms".

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.

It's not "Illegal number" it is "Illegal prime number".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number. Illegal prime number is just a minor specialization of the same concept.

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.