First Illegal Prime

Generated by Phil Carmody in March 2001 this 1905 digit prime number is a binary representation of a gzip archive of the famous DeCSS decryption algorithm which can be used to circumvent a DVD's copy prevention. Released in October 1999 by three coders, one of them would later become famous for the code, and would become known around the world as DVD Jon.

In accordance with the DMCA, anything which circumvents encryption is Illegal, therefore so is the DeCSS code. By this reasoning the prime number, which can be ungziped into the full C source for DeCSS must also be Illegal, making it the first Illegal number ever. Since being a prime number is an natural, intrinsic property of numbers, it would be impossible to truly outlaw, or own, a number (if this turns out to not be true I'm going to copyright the number "1" right away, just think of all the royalties on hard drives everywhere!)

Phil Carmody, in his brilliance, knew that he needed to get this prime recorded somewhere that would record it forever as a feature of a number, and not specifically as a number that represented anything. So he was determined to make it into record on Professor Caldwell's Prime Pages, where the largest primes discovered are archived. His success in this endeavor led to the prime being listed in many more places as well, like the Prime Curios pages, which list primes with interesting features, such as being the first illegal one!

So here, presented for you is the first official illegal number, wear it proudly, and if you ever need to decrypt a DVD, just use this little perl script to grab the prime from the Prime Curios page, and unzip it. Remember, numbers are a property of the universe and cannot be legal, or illegal, they just are, wear it.