3 ms·
Y'all totally missed what's going on here. Primepages (http://primes.utm.edu/ http://primes.utm.edu/) lists the largest known primes of various forms. One of t
by randomwalker 17y ago
Y'all totally missed what's going on here.
Primepages (http://primes.utm.edu/ http://primes.utm.edu/) lists the largest known primes of various forms. One of the categories is primes that have no special form, which are the hardest to prove prime.
Chris Caldwell, the primepages maintainer, called up Phil Carmody and said, "Phil, if you can turn DeCSS into a 'general prime' that's big enough for the top 20 ever discovered, I'll be happy to host it on primepages." (Just as he would host any prime, DeCSS or not, that was big enough for the top 20.) So Phil did, cuz he's a smart guy and had a lot of computrons, and the prime went in the database.
The point here is that if you're merely turning data into a number, you have no legitimate reason to distribute it other than whatever reason you had to distribute the data itself. However, primepages existed long before DeCSS became a problem, and was arguably simply doing what it always did, which is to list the top tens.
I don't know if that would hold up in court -- it was never tested -- but the argument is a lot more subtle than what people are criticizing here.
An aside: Phil and I worked together on some other primality records. I wrote most of that Wikipedia article back in 2002 or so, and they went and featured it.. this was all before the rules for citations/references on Wikipedia became tighter than a mouse's arsehole. So if anyone is in the mood to add some citations, that would be much appreciated.
- tshaddox 17y agoI don't see how "a reason to distribute it" is necessary. What if I just choose a completely random integer with 2000 digits and host it? I don't have any reason to do so, and it's certainly not illegal. Then someone comes along and generates a program that's equivalent to that number, or some digital media rights developer happens to use that number as a key for encrypting some copyrighted media. Does my original act of hosting suddenly become illegal, because I had no good reason to host the number in the first place?
- yoden 17y agoThe probability of you doing that without piracy is so vanishingly small as to be irrelevant.
- yoden 17y agoThis is actually a really interesting idea I can't believe I haven't heard of yet. No matter what the angry neckbeards might say, just because content is a number doesn't mean copyright is invalid. Obviously, we can generalize this approach to more than primes. Still, I imagine any idea would be extremely hard to scale up to mp3/video/game sizes, so it looks like those content industries are safe for now.