Todd Allen wrote:
On 5/7/07, Ed Sanders ejsanders@gmail.com wrote:
What about a 20k hex number that represents a child porn JPEG? Publishing that number would be highly illegal. "Complete nonsense" indeed...
Ed.
Yann Forget wrote:
Illegal number? Do you have any legal argument? There is none on this page. At least quite a lot of people have understood that the rethoric from the majors is completely baseless.
Publishing a number is spamming? Publising a number would be illegal? This is a complete nonsense.
Wake up guys!
Yann
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It depends. If you were publishing the image, formatted and set up as an image file, that would be illegal. If, instead, you were simply publishing a text file containing the numeric value making up that image, why should it be?
Don't be ridiculous. Of course it would be illegal, and anyone found with such a file on their computer would certainly be put in jail, regardless of whether you changed the file extension, the encoding, or even tried to encrypt it.
That's exactly why this whole thing is pretty slippery. Computers transmit and manipulate vast quantities of numerical values. There's no way to remove that capability from a computer and still have it work. Any given numeric value could represent any number of things, just as in the real world. What is "100"? My age? The number of pennies it takes to make up one dollar? The third octet of my IP in decimal form? The ASCII code for the letter "d"?
Making the comparison is "100" is very naive. 100 is a very small number, and one you could chance upon in a number of circumstances. The probability of accidentally or coincidentally reproducing a 32 hex digit number is completely negligible, even over a dataset as large as the internet. There are about as many 32 byte strings (64 hex digits) as there are atoms in the universe.
The answer to all of the above could certainly be "yes". Numeric values are -just numbers-. A credit card number, in and of itself, is
Again a credit card number is long enough that it couldn't be "just a number". I don't think anyone arrested for stealing credit card databases has gotten off by claiming the were just collecting interesting numbers.
just a number. Misusing that number, by for example making an unauthorized purchase on the card, is an action, and is and should be illegal. Knowing something is not a crime. Acting on it might be.
But distributing the numbers is also a crime, regardless of whether you used them or not.