Slashdot Mirror
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."
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....
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 question is, how much of your own creativity is in the selection of the number sequence you base your music on.
Pi is a quite canonical choice, so there is not much creativity in it. Creativity can be put into the rules that convert pi into an actual music sheet, and this still can be copyrightable. But just because you used pi, you cannot claim copyright infringment against someone else who used pi too.
The point isn't that it's not copyright-able, but that this particular work, based on the same theme as another work, did not infringe on the earlier work. This is just common sense, and good application of copyright law (if there can be such a thing). For instance, if I arrange Beethoven's 5th for brass quintet, and you come by a year later and also arrange Beethoven's 5th for brass quintet, you haven't infringed my copyright. If, however, you transcribe my arrangement and turn it into a work for strings, you have (arguably) infringed my copyright. Something like this may be hard to prove, but it makes perfect sense to musicians.
The point is that the "idea" or "form" of a work may not be copyrighted. But the actual work can. The combination of notes, rhythms, harmonies, tone colors, etc. all come together form the copyrighted work. If I take the same harmonic and rhythmic structure of the Pi Symphony and simply change the "melody" (if you can call it that) to e rather than pi, then I may still have infringed on Erickson's copyright. That's another grey area. I would at least consider it borrowing. Then again, there are entire genres entirely defined by their harmonic and rhythmic structure (e.g. blues), so it would be a hard argument to win.
Considering that pi represented as a decimal number is infinitely long, it would eventually contain the encoding for every song in existence.