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".