Concerning illegal primes
Since this blog is to be concerned with efforts to combat, evade, and withdraw from commercial mass culture, the title “illegal prime” seemed appropriate. In 1998, the passage of the Digital Millenium Copyrights Act established legislative basis for the placement of severe and often crippling restrictions on the development and use of communications and media technologies. Under the DMCA, possession or distribution of source code that can be used to create programs that circumvent copy-protection schemes is deemed illegal. In a suit by the Motion Picture Association of America, DeCSS, a program to decrypt copy-protected DVDs for fair-use backups and otherwise, was deemed in violation of the DMCA and thereby its source code became illegal information.
Of course, the idea that pure information in the form of source code can be considered contraband has rubbed more than a few people the wrong way. As Wikipedia notes, many hold that “because source code conveys information to programmers, is written in a language, and can be used to share humour and other artistic pursuits, it is a protected form of communication” under the first ammendment. A number of efforts have subsequently been made to demonstrate how ludicrous such attempts to legislate knowledge out of existence are. And so, in 2001, the first illegal prime number was born.
