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Concept
Illegal number
Summary
An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.
A number may represent some type of classified information or trade secret, legal to possess only by certain authorized persons. An AACS encryption key (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0) that came to prominence in May 2007 is an example of a number claimed to be a secret, and whose publication or inappropriate possession is claimed to be illegal in the United States. It allegedly assists in the decryption of any HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc released before this date. The issuers of a series of cease-and-desist letters claim that the key itself is therefore a copyright circumvention device, and that publishing the key violates Title 1 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In part of the DeCSS court order and in the AACS legal notices, the claimed protection for these numbers is based on their mere possession and the value or potential use of the numbers. This makes their status and legal issues surrounding their distribution quite distinct from that of copyright infringement.
Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number. In certain jurisdictions, there are images that are illegal to possess, due to obscenity or secrecy/classified status, so the corresponding numbers could be illegal.
In 2011 Sony sued George Hotz and members of fail0verflow for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3. Part of the lawsuit complaint was that they had published PS3 keys. Sony also threatened to sue anyone who distributed the keys. Sony later accidentally retweeted an older dongle key through its fictional Kevin Butler character.
As a protest of the DeCSS case, many people created "steganographic" versions of the illegal information (i.e.
Official source
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