[JackC]

> Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share?

Yeah, it's not unusual for short messages containing numbers to be illegal. Like:

"The guy at 42 Foo St. is looking to sell a kilo of coke if anyone's interested."

or

"Everyone show up at the mall at 11PM exactly, grab something, and run. They can't catch us all!"[1]

or

"Thank you for your payment to personaldeetz.com! Bill Jones has the social security number 001-23-4567 and the date of birth 1/2/34 and the bank account number ..."

There's nothing illegal about any of the numbers involved here, including the hash of the latest blockbuster. But there can certainly be something illegal about conveying information (in whatever encoding) that's intended to help someone commit a crime. Proving intent is the fun part.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob#Crime