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Judge Rules Pi-Based Music Is Non-Copyrightable
New submitter AnalogDiehard writes "A copyright case alleging infringement of a 1992 Lars Erickson song 'The Pi Symphony' by Michael John Blake's 'What Pi Sounds Like' was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Simon. Both pieces were conceived by assigning numbers to musical notes, then deriving a melody based on the pattern defined by a finite set of numbers in Pi. Judge Simon wrote in his legal opinion, intentionally announced on Pi day (3/14), that 'Pi is a non-copyrightable fact.' While the Judge did not invalidate the Erickson copyright, he ruled that 'Mr. Erickson may not use his copyright to stop others from employing this particular pattern of musical notes.' The judge further ruled that the two pieces were not sufficiently similar — for instance, its harmonies, structure and cadence are all different."
I can now see that it will be inevitable that several new songs will come out that sample PI.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
If we could just get this same judge, who obviously has some common sense and a critical eye for detail, to rule on a few other copyright cases, we might be able to right this severely listing ship....
I don't want to fire in the old cliché of "OMG A SENSIBLE COURT DECISION", but it's nice to see common sense employed.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I don't see how this should be any different? I remember seeing fractal music a while back.. that shouldn't be copyrightable either? Im curious.
Any IP lawyer know if this could have aaaaany possible effects on software patents?
In the little pretend world in my head, this seems like a basis for attacking terrible software patents.
Of course pi-based music is copyrightable. TFA even states explicitly: "That doesn't mean Erickson's copyright is invalid." Both Erickson and Blake retain copyright over their respective songs, which (other than both being based off pi) are distinct. What is not copyrightable is the idea of basing a song off pi. The title should have read "Judge Rules Pi Is Non-Copyrightable."
The entire dispute was completely irrational!
licet differant, aequabitur
Since you can essentially find any pattern you'd like in pi somewhere, doesn't this mean that all music (which must somewhere be encoded into pi) is non copyrightable? Take that, RIAA.
If music made from pi is copyrightable, and pi is a natural number which existed before any of the stuff that the RIAA peddles, then you could go arbitrarily deep into the digits of pi and find just about any sequence of notes ever composed, and claim that just about any melody existed in pi before it was recorded and sold.
Since copyright infringement can be found on the basis of a recognizable sequence of only a few notes, the potential ramifications of copyrighting pi would be immense.
A long long time ago
I can still remember how
That number used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those lawyers dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But March 14th made me shiver
With every digit I'd deliver
Bad news in the courtroom
I couldn't take one more suit
I can't remember if I cried
When I read the judges opines
But something touched me deep inside
The day the copyright died.
Bye, bye to copyrighted Pi
Drove my Chevy to the courthouse where the lawyers would fight
But them good ole boys were thinking common sense was all right
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die
John
The point here is that EVERY file is basically nothing more than a huge bignum, and the question is whether numbers (as huge as they may be) are copyrightable or not.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Because the choice of where to start has infinite possibility and how to assign the digits is a creative choice, it makes sense to allow copyrights on pi-based. The judge correctly limited his ruling. I would treat any such copyrights as a performance of public domain works.
So it has come to this.
I wonder if the court is willing to decide at what point creativity is said to occur. If I reduce "Yesterday" to a function of the night sky, would it succumb?
Now if they had only based it off of tau instead, they both would have independently produced the William Tell Overture.
like if somebody records Bach or some other older music that is open and non-copyrightable then when someone records an album for sale and it contains classics of long dead artists then they should not expect any copyrights to it since they did not actually create anything they just recorded someone else's creation
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Considering that pi represented as a decimal number is infinitely long, it would eventually contain the encoding for every song in existence.
So this means everyone really is entitled to their own piece of the Pi.
Doesn't PI contain all finite sequences as substrings? Show the judge that--under this note-assignment scheme--every possible song appears somewhere in PI. And every possible movie, picture, software or other digital artifact also occurs on PI. Everything's a derivative of PI!!
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
A patent for creating music from numbers... using a computer.
Isn't the issue basically the same as Illegal Primes? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_Primes).
I wonder if this does affect those kind of problems (IANAL).
I still own the copyright on any works based on sqrt(2), phi, e, and my favorite i, 'The Imaginary Symphony'.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
And yet 433 is copyrighted.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The author of the TFA seems unaware that not all musical compositions are "songs"; the Pi Symphony being a case in point.
...and, as long as each artist created the work entirely independently, both would still be copyrightable.
It's an interesting theoretical distinction between patents and copyright. Two artists could create exactly the same song, in terms of key, tempo, rhythm, melody, chord structure, tambre, etc. As long as each artists did so independently of the other, both songs would be properly copyrightable by the author.
In practice this doesn't happen; at least I haven't heard about a real example. When one finds substantial similarities in two works, they look to prove to a sufficient legal standard that a later song borrowed from an earlier one. If one can show exposure to the earlier work, that's usually enough to prevail. For example, George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" was so close to Ronnie Mack's "He's So Fine", and it was pretty easy to show that Harrison certainly must have heard the Mack song before.
Just about all music is based on math, 1-4-5 is a very common one
and probably exists in 80% of all (and I do mean all) music.
They really should have calculated pi in base 12 not 10. In one octave of western music, there are 12 notes. It would be a much fuller piece of music with the use of the sharps or flats.
This means that is has just become VERY important for mathematicians to figure out whether PI is normal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number)
(TL;DR version: a normal number is one in which every sequence of digits occurs)
You see, if every sequence occurs in PI, this actually means that no sequence is copyrightable, abolishing copyright right away :)
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
His problem was that he used copyright law to protect his work. He should have patented a method of assigning values to various musical notations and using a mathematical generator based on the value of Pi to construct a melody. That way, given the crazy patent system, his work would be protected because anybody else would violate his patent.
Should be judged as unlistenable too. Sometimes some novelty just tries too hard
We should have been
So much more by now
Too dead inside
To even know the guilt
and you can represent every file as a number, you can now abandon all copyright on digital files.
this does not apply for stuff like real art, because there is no finite representation of an image on real paper. so you cannot find all the information contained in the image in pi, so its still copyrightable.
Everyone knows music based on Tau is better.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
n/t
Captcha: caffein
So my romantic comedy/alien invasion musical based on Euler's number can just be copied?
And there goes my 36 part interpretive dance western series based on DeVicci's tesseract constant.
the transcription of pi to music is a non-copyrightable idea. The resulting pattern of notes is an expression that merges with the non-copyrightable idea of putting pi to music: assigning digits to musical notes and playing those notes in the sequence of pi is an idea that can only be expressed in a finite number of ways.
However, I doubt that the statement "assigning digits to musical notes and playing those notes in the sequence of pi is an idea that can only be expressed in a finite number of ways" is true. Certainly, the judge cannot prove that statement. Therefore I think his ruling is not logically sound.
For instance, I could take any sufficiently long sequence of digits in pi and come up with a mapping of those digits to notes to produce the song "Beat It". A corollary: the legal system in the US is complete shit.
but .. shouldn't a song based on pi, be a single instrument with a single stave of music. There are not harmonizing numbers when dealing with math. why should a musical representation of such have more than a single line of music?
So it seems Lars can't have his pie and eat it too.
So does this mean that Lateralus by Tool is not covered by copyright because the cadence of the vocals and the time signature are based on the Fibonacci sequence?
Every piece of music is could be an interpretation of pi.
It's just a matter of identifying a part of pi such that the mapping is sufficiently simple as not to be copyrightable.
Same applies for all creations and ideas whatsoever.
You're quite right, but Corruption is the law profession's "Division By Zero".
Maybe you've seen those proofs of 1=0. Of course they run on an engine of D-B-Z.
But using how it's all shaking down socially with copyright, you get "Gamer Strategies" like the one you presented. It's like a judge running you through that proof, then ordering "Divide by zero as instructed or become a Terrorist!" Then the predictably irrational result comes out.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
what the judge said is taking an idea (begin with Pi encode using THIS MAPPING to create THIS SONG) can not be copywritten but your particular version can be copywritten.
so A uses THIS MAPPING to create THIS SONG and sells it
then
B uses THAT MAPPING to create THAT SONG and sells it
A can not Sue B
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If pi goes on forever and never repeats, then shouldn't all music (or anything) that was ever made and ever will be made, be able to found some where inside of pi's endless randomness. I think this judgement defeats all copy write.
Rocket Surgeon.
If 'Pi is a non-copyrightable fact', nothing is copyrightable because if you go far enough in decimal digits of Pi, you'll find any series you want, be it encoded works of Shakespeare or Lady Gaga's newest hit.
Reminds me of Illegal Prime...
Steal from this and I'll send Scully after you.
Nice to see that Judges are actually looking at the evidence and making solid rulings
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Real composers would use Avogadro's Constant!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This also means that any music produced using the Raspberry Pi will be public domain.
But only contains two digits: 0 and 1.
must've been a very short song, seeing as pi is exactly equal to 3
Many, many years ago there was a patent on a set of wheelbarrow hand grips that also included the wheelbarrow according to the title on the application. The applicant was in the construction industry and sent out a gag letter demanding royalties to the trade. A good laugh all around.
You can patent an algorithm but not the input to that algorithm. If you could do that, Sesame Street would contrtol all the letters and digits! They can document first explicit usage with video! The star witness will be Big Bird! He is better than busload of Nuns. Settle out of court now.