Which it doesn't actually do. Whatever you think of copyright law, the nonsense lies in our contradictory intuition that information is "special" and numbers, e

Which it doesn't actually do. Whatever you think of copyright law, the nonsense lies in our contradictory intuition that information is "special" and numbers, even large ones, aren't. But beyond about, oh say, 128 bits[1], numbers take on all the properties we expect of "special" information. I can, for instance, encode a picture of you doing something embarrassing as a very large prime[2] number. Yet my protest of "it's just a prime number, bro!" isn't likely to calm you when I start passing it around to all your friends. Information is information. It's not unreasonable to have rules about the flow of information, however cleverly you've encoded it. [1] https://qntm.org/number https://qntm.org/number [2] The primality is of course totally irrelevant, but it makes it seem more "mathy"