I'll bet you didn't know that numbers could be illegal. Take 92214563780560366130661709445338835634 for instance. Looks pretty innocent, doesn't it?

That's the decimal version of an AACS processing key, and it's illegal to publish that particular key in many countries (the US of A and possibly even Finland, for instance) since it enables you to decrypt any HD-DVD / Blu-ray disks you legally bought. And decrypting legally purchased media sounds like it ought to be criminalized, right?

What if /dev/random  (the standard random number generator on many UNIX-like operating systems) happened to spit that number out one day? Would you be guilty of a crime? What if some mathematical equation happened to yield that number as a solution? Let's say that for whatever reason you have the calculation 0xD116C89E071A6D82860B519264D65FBE1A2 / 0x3039  on a web page. The result is the AACS key and in hexadecimal no less. Would the calculation itself be safe to show, but the result would be illegal? What is I just blatantly paste a number like 0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 on the page? Does that make me a felon?

In this case it does, since that's an illegal number.

Sure, most intellectual property nowadays can be converted to a long string of numbers, but these are something different. They started their life as numbers, and short ones at that. They have no inherent value, they're not works of art and they don't do anything as such. Utter them alound, however, and you're bound for a lawsuit.

Primality 

How about some really pathological cases like this prime number (unearthed by Phil Carmody) which contains a DeCSS executable in linux ELF (i386) format. If you distribute this number, you're distributing a CSS cracker and therefore committing a crime in several countries.

With any programming experience it is trivial to convert this number into an executable and then run it on an i386-compatible computer. (Which would obviously be criminal and nobody should do it, ever.)

The funny thing is, prime numbers have scientific value, so would it be justifiable to ban a prime?

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