What if I can encode a movie by n^m then it becomes a crime to share that number. copyright makes numbers illegal, it's hard for most to understand since these are very large numbers. what if I can express the information as 2 numbers. (n) and (m) n^m. .... then n and m individually are not illegal, but someone telling you that you can apply ^ to it becomes illegal. or maybe that is not illegal, but if you consume it as the appropriate media it becomes illegal. ... the challenge today is that sharing these numbers or possession of these numbers are a crime. sure, you can call it a file, but it's just a number. if i take a foo.mpeg file and rename it foo.dat or encode it as a zip, gz, string of 1 & 0s, uuencoded data, the law makes all of that illegal. For now these numbers are illegal, but should numbers be illegal?