It certainly makes for an interesting discussion, however, your view is fringe here -- the laws of virtually every free democracy on the planet encapsulate the idea of some information being illegal.
HOWEVER: the gp point wasn't coming at it from your perspective there. They were saying (as I understood it) the fact that integers are "just numbers" meant that banning them was nonsensical. By extension, the illegality of distributing them would also be nonsensical.
Illegal to disseminate, not to own. There should be no punishment for being able to access or possessing information; Liability should squarely sit with the publisher, intentional or otherwise.
Or maybe....we should look at who is distributing material that we have a problem with, and target it there? As a society we should never be putting people in jail for just owning a certain piece of information, would you not agree?
Incidentally there isn’t a single country (as far as I could find) where owning Mein Kampf is or was illegal. There’s a common misconception that its possession is or was illegal in Germany. However, this was never the case. Until 2016 the state of Bavaria owned the exclusive copyright and prohibited its publication. But that’s it.
This sort of "everything is allowed" arguments just seems like a way to avoid having to think carefully about what restrictions are reasonable, and what constitutes responsible use of information. Simply lazy irresponsibility.
Regarding responsibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933814
Truth is, often correlations are the only things we can go after to fight the things we don't want.
