Judge Rules Pi-Based Music Is Non-Copyrightable 183
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."
Sensible (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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:What this is all about (Score:3, Interesting)
A book, a song, a program, a widget, hell YOU, can all be represented by a large enough number.
The point is whether there's enough "original creativity" in developing that bignum to warrant protection. Some things should be protected, some should not. We can argue all day about what should be protected, how long that protection should last and what the punishment for violating those protections should be. My answers, even as both a patent and copyright holder, are less, less, and less.
But to argue that simply because something can be represented as just a number means it shouldn't be protected is ridiculous.
Is PI Normal? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 :)
Re:Slahdot gets it wrong as usual (Score:4, Interesting)
-phone dial tones are actually two-note chords, and every phone number can be represented musically
-a couple of (Australian, IIRC) composers went through all the permutations of all the chords of phone-number length
-they then tried to enforce their copyright, by claiming every time a number was dialed it was a performance of their copyrighted song.
It was a beautifully subversive idea. While I'm glad I don't have to pay royalties to dial a number, part of me wishes they had gotten rich for coming up with the idea.