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Judge Rules Pi-Based Music Is Non-Copyrightable

Posted by timothy on from the but-don't-go-stealing-from-feigenbaum dept.

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."

2 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Infinity by Hatta · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not every infinitely long random number contains every possible pattern. Consider an infinitely long sequence of digits. Now drop all '1's from the sequence. You still have an infinitely long series of random digits, in that knowing previous digits doesn't help you predict future digits. However, this infinite random sequence does not contain every possible pattern.

    Whether this applies to pi or not, I have no idea.

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  2. Re:Infinity by FrangoAssado · · Score: 5, Informative

    Considering that pi represented as a decimal number is infinitely long, it would eventually contain the encoding for every song in existence.

    Actually, that does not necessarily follow.

    It's not known whether pi contains every finite-length sequence in its decimal expansion (although most people believe it to be true). In fact, our knowledge is even worse than that (from Wikipedia):

    It is for instance unknown whether sqrt(2), pi, ln(2) or e is normal (but all of them are strongly conjectured to be normal, because of some empirical evidence). It is not even known whether all digits occur infinitely often in the decimal expansions of those constants.

    Here's some more discussion about that: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/96632/do-the-digits-of-pi-contain-every-possible-finite-length-digit-sequence