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Re:Illegal prime number by simias on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:02AM (#8108143)
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...

Re:Illegal prime number by fishnchips on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:10AM (#8108197)
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.
Re:Illegal prime number by thisjepisje on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:10AM (#8108199)
The source code would practically be in the transformation, the bible would only be a key.
Re:Illegal prime number by CWuestefeld on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:19AM (#8108258)
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.

Re:Illegal prime number by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:13AM (#8108218)
Eh, you could deliberately word-substitute and reformat the bible so that it, itself, contains the data in some form.
Re:Illegal prime number by thisjepisje on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:20AM (#8108264)
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.
Re:Illegal prime number by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:24AM (#8108299)
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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Re:Illegal prime number by Allysquad on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:23AM (#8108295)
Use Synesthesia to build up a coloured picture of the ilegal prime. Boom "Art".