This number is illegal in the USA

[Alex K]

Code:

N = 493108359702850190027577767239076495728490777215020863208075\
   018409792627885097658864557802013660073286795447341128317353\
   678312015575359819785450548115719393458773300380099326195058\
   764525023820408110189885042615176579941704250889037029119015\
   870030479432826073821469541570330227987557681895601624030064\
   111516900872879838194258271674564774816684347928464580929131\
   531860070010043353189363193439129486044503709919800477094629\
   215581807111691530318762884778783541575932891093295447350881\
   882465495060005019006274705305381164278294267474853496525745\
   368151170655028190555265622135314631042100866286797114446706\
   366921982586158111251555650481342076867323407655054859108269\
   562666930662367997021048123965625180068183236539593483956753\
   575575324619023481064700987753027956186892925380693305204238\
   149969945456945774138335689906005870832181270486113368202651\
   590516635187402901819769393767785292872210955041292579257381\
   866058450150552502749947718831293104576980909153046133594190\
   302588132059322774443852550466779024518697062627788891979580\
   423065750615669834695617797879659201644051939960716981112615\
   195610276283233982579142332172696144374438105648552934887634\
   921030988702878745323313253212267863328370279250997499694887\
   759369159176445880327183847402359330203748885067557065879194\
   611341932307814854436454375113207098606390746417564121635042\
   388002967808558670370387509410769821183765499205204368255854\
   642288502429963322685369124648550007559166402472924071645072\
   531967449995294484347419021077296068205581309236268379879519\
   661997982855258871610961365617807456615924886608898164568541\
   721362920846656279131478466791550965154310113538586208196875\
   836883595577893914545393568199609880854047659073589728989834\
   250471289184162658789682185380879562790399786294493976054675\
   348212567501215170827371076462707124675321024836781594000875\
   05452543537

Source

I bring this up because the USA are pretty extremist on IP laws favouring super rich publishers. As mentioned in my previous thread, the Productivity Commission (AU) draft report into IP has suggested dropping software patents altogether and reducing the term of copyright to just 15-25 years in total (as opposed to, well, the perpetual copyrights of today which are defined as "life of author + 70 years" with many corporate publishers asserting authorship over copyrighted works to make the term of copyright last forever).

The number above is a prime number, and is used to decrypt CSS. Note that the same draft Productivity Commission report mentioned states clearly that any copyright infringement that does not directly harm the owner should not be an infringement. In otherwords, we should indeed pave the way for people to be able to decrypt their own movies however they want, so long as their enjoyment isn't directly harmful to the copyright owner. That would seem downright sensible.

To quote:

It'll be an uphill battle to bring about change, but it'll be great when we do. Hopefully if we and other commonwealth countries like Canada start showing some real initiative on IP then other countries will follow the example - instead of following the USA into banning public libraries and deliberately extending existing copyrights so they don't enter public domain (under the guise of "restoring copyrights").

Call me stupid, because all of this is confusing. But could you put this in layman's terms for those of us who never got beyond consumer math in high school?

A computer program can be viewed as one long number, if you interpret all its bytes as digits, roughly speaking. A prime number is a number which you cannot divide by anything except 1 and itself without remainder, such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13...
There is an infinite number of them, and finding very big ones or ones with special properties, with many hundred digits or more, has important applications in encryption and as a mathematical curiosity. There are websites which publish large prime numbers ppl discover for scientific purposes.

Now, what would happen, legally, if one were to recast a computer program which is illegal to distribute, such as the decss-ptogram for decrypting copyprotected DVDs , in such a way that its bytes were one huge prime number? Primes are just a fact of nature, such as pi or the golden ratio, how could their distribution possibly be illegal. This is the amusing conundrum they exploited here.