Not long after the DeCSS clampdown began, programmers and activists around the web began to push back, by submitting all sorts of versions of the program to an online gallery. They’d printed it on t-shirts and even written out exactly what it did in the form of a poem. Someone even recorded a square dance song version. It was a kind of collective protest against the notion that someone could ban the distribution of a program; that someone could ban an expression of ideas.

“I think this attracted the interest of anybody who’s a computer programmer because the issue of prohibiting the distribution of source code was pretty new at the time,” says Dave Touretzky, the professor at Carnegie Mellon who curated the DeCSS gallery. “There hadn’t been a lot of cases like this so the very notion that you could do this troubled a lot of people.”

One person who wanted to contribute something different was Phil Carmody, a software engineer living in Cambridge, England. Just over a year after DeCSS was published on the internet, Carmody set out on a personal mission.

His goal was to convert the DeCSS program into a special number – just a long integer – but one that was in some way historically important. The number, and therefore in a sense the program, would then be, as he put it, “beyond the reach of the law”. “I needed to find a presentation of the data such that it had an intrinsically archivable quality,” he wrote.