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."

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: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 [wikipedia.org]):

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 [stackexchange.com]

Re:Sensible

[jellomizer]

While I take that comment in jest. I think legally if someone Patented making music based on Pi, you may be able sue the holders for Patent infringement. As it is a different type of legal standard.
The Copyright failed because while the two pieces used the same process they had different output (in essence a different song). However the patent you own rights to the process.

Re:Sensible

[Anonymous Coward]

Judge Michael H. Simon :
12.03.14 - Restate my assumptions.
1> The harmonies of the two pieces differed significantly.
2> The structure of the two pieces differed significantly.
3> The cadence of the two pieces differed significantly.
4> Pi is a non-copyrightable fact.
therefore
Michael John Blake is an asshole wasting precious court time trying to leech any attention and money he can from anyone using the value Pi.

Missing the Point

[RobertLTux]

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