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Comment by praptak | Hacker News Reader

Primes are pretty dense. If you can encode something as a number, then you can encode it as a prime number with enough padding.

Therefore I don't see how those numbers being prime changes anything. This looks to me like a weak argument that tries to take advantage of poor intuitions that some people have about primes.

Yes, the IP laws are ridiculous but this is not a good argument to support this opinion.

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Exactly. Primality is nothing more than a misleading intuition pump to make you think in terms of "innocent bit of number theory", instead of "encoded data file". Even the term "illegal number" is designed to make you think this way; somehow, "legally protected secret" doesn't sound quite so absurd.

And yet regardless debate about hypotheticals, Phil Carmody discovered the first non-trivial executable titanic prime, Professor Caldwell published it and neither of them faced repercussions.

Why would it be illegal to publish that particular executable? Was it harmful?

It circumvented the copy protection on DVDs. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

There is no question that the person creating and publishing the prime is infringing copyright. However, they aren't the ones actually publishing the information. The copyright infringer creates the prime, proves something interesting about it and then the fan websites (like PrimePages mentioned in the articles) actually distribute the primes.

> If you can encode something as a number, then you can encode it as a prime number with enough padding.

Isn’t this what godel’s encoding does?

No, everything but single characters are composite numbers in Gödel encoding

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