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."

Comments

Now...

[Immostlyharmless]

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....

Re:Now...

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> this severely listing ship....

Arrrr, and a pirate ship she be, me hearties!

Sensible

[Macthorpe]

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.

All music is aligned numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:All music is aligned numbers

[Sique]

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.

Re:All music is aligned numbers

[orgelspieler]

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.

Slahdot gets it wrong as usual

[McDutchie]

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."

Copyright infringement?

[Rudisaurus]

The entire dispute was completely irrational!

Re:Copyright infringement?

[Thuktun]

The entire dispute was completely irrational!

I wish 'i' had thought of that.

I'm sure there are complex reasons you didn't.

Re:Patents

[Cornwallis]

PI not IP

Bye, bye, copyrighted Pi

[plover]

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

Re:Patents

[MountainLogic]

So PI is french for IP or more correctly la propriété intellectuelle

Re:Infinity

[Hatta]

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.

Re:Patents

[mooingyak]

Yeah but the French do everything backwards. Their word for "states" is "etats".

Re:Infinity

[FrangoAssado]

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

Re:PI song

[MightyMartian]

Pi is for losers. Music based on Euler's number, now those are symphonies. Oh, and if I catch one of you pirating thieves trying to steal my Euler tune, I'm gonna get all kinds of ACTA on your asses.

Re:PI song

[aevan]

Dur? Isn't it common for everyone to want their slice of the Pi?

*blames lack of coffee for inability to resist bad pun