Copyrighting Pi

[Yoyti]

So there's this guy, Michael Blake. He posted a video on youtube some time ago, title "What Pi Sounds Like." He had canonized the digits of pi into a very entertaining and catchy piece of music. So then there's this other guy, Lars Erickson. Lars Erickson composed a piece titled "Pi Symphony" in which he turned pi into a symphony of sorts. So long story short, Erickson sued Blake and forced him to take his video down, because he claimed that, since he copyrighted the Pi Symphony, no one else should be able to use the melody obtained from the first several digits of pi, and he even claims that "there's plenty of digits for everyone else."

I find this ridiculous for a few reasons. First off, no one's going to know it's pi if you start your piece at some arbitrary digit. Secondly, he's basically suing over an inspiration. If person A wrote a piece inspired by ravioli, and then person B wrote a different piece inspired by ravioli, B isn't stealing from A just for using the same inspiration.

The main reason this enrages me, though, is that the inspiration Erickson claims to have copyrighted is purely mathematical. It wasn't his composition. Only his arrangement of that melody. If two people made different arrangements of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, they shouldn't have anything against each other, because neither of them composed the melody. Only that particular interpretation of the melody.

Also, the pieces only sound alike because they are using the same mathematical constant as the melody. Other than that, they are very different compositions.

What do you think? Does Lars Erickson's copyright give him exclusive rights to the melody of pi in a major chord? Was Erickson right to sue Blake?

[Deleted]

I don't think so. I think Pi is as much a number as 1 or 2 and everyone has their own interpretations of any number as with any other aspect of the world. Some people write songs about how great people are and some people write songs about how horrible people are. There's no right or wrong, it's just a different point of view. It's a opinion on a number expressed through music, and people should just agree to disagree on the matter.

[Deleted]

Looks like Erickson wanted... *takes off sunglasses* ...a bigger slice of pi.

To actually be mature and address the question, I'd think that whoever posted the video first would have the 'rights' to the song, but unless it was actually the same tune I don't think you should/could sue. I mean, Erickson's complaint is that the songs have the same subject matter, right? If we followed that train of thought, is any song that mentions a theme used in a previous song plagarism?

I think the short answer is no, because no one can 'own' a theme or a subject matter. Tune, yes - lyrics that are in the public domain, no.

I think Erickson needs... *puts on sunglasses* ... a slice of humble pi.

[Pacmanite]

Thing is, I listened to both of the recordings and they do share the same "tune". They develop the tune in very different ways, but it is the theme at the centre of both of their ideas. Also, both artists used the idea of creating a chord progression based on the digits of Pi. That means their "accompaniment" to the tune also bears some similarity.

Personally, I don't think that either of these composers directly stole the idea from each other. They both extrapolated from the pattern 3141592653589..., and made the obvious choice to let 1=1st note of a scale, 2=2nd note, 3=3rd note and so on to produce a tune. I think once the idea enters a composer's head, "hey, let's make a tune from Pi" that would be the logical way to go about it.

I agree with Yoyti that it is unfathomable that a composer could attempt to copyright a number. Needless to say, Erickson did not invent Pi.

The matter becomes tricky, though, because it's hard to define what exactly Erickson owns. 3141592 is not a tune when it is just numbers on a page. But it is a tune when you play it as a sequence of notes. That is the innovation that Erickson claims to have done. But is it enough? Is making a number into a catchy tune enough of a transformation to warrant it an original and creative sample of music?

There are some other differences in the tune, though. Erickson varied the rhythm of it, so when the theme is first introduced it sounds tentative but exciting, good for the opening of a symphony. Blake played it as a constant ticking stream of notes (he names his metronome speed at the beginning of the piece!), giving it a contemplative and self-consciously mathematical appeal. Both composers made different decisions about how they would handle the sequence of notes and, rhythm being the most important element that can be creatively varied when the pitch has already been set, this indicates that the composers creatively used the source code of numbers in a different way.

So, I don't think Erickson has that much of a meaningful claim to sue Blake over using Pi as inspiration for writing a piece of music. Pi exists independently of the composer's creation, and the mere sequence of notes and chords based on its numbers is basically the only thing that links the two pieces of music together.

[Jacob]

Oct 4, 2011 8:16:33 GMT -5 @legendaerielt said:

I think Erickson needs... *puts on sunglasses* ... a slice of humble pi.

YEEEAAAHHH!!!

*ahem* Perhaps we could look at this through the early Disney profit model. Disney built their animation company from building upon work that wasn't under copyright, thereby making a new copyright with their creation (and then rewriting law to extend copyright much farther than it needed, but that's another matter). I feel this is a bit of what was done with Pi, a piece of data which has existed long after whatever copyright it would supposedly be under.

The thing is, A lot of classical music is now public domain, and anyone can freely take the sheet music of Beethoven and make something of it, commercial or otherwise. However, you cannot use another recording of such unless you have explicit permission or the copyright has expired.

With this knowledge, I think it's fairly clear which way this case should go.

[Pacmanite]

I'm not quite sure what you meant there about the public domain and the comparison of Beethoven, Jacob... not all classical music is old enough to be in the public domain, and the Pi Symphony was written in the 1990s, and its composer is still alive.

edit: never mind, I think I got you now. You mean to say that if a contemporary composer were to use something as old as Pi in their work, it would be like using something in the public domain such as a quotation from Beethoven. I think that's fair.

(To be honest, classical musicians have done a lot of sneaky quoting of their living contemporaries, even sometimes very mean and unflattering quotation. Stravinsky's Nightingale rips a bird-sounding passage from Wagner's ring cycle, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra makes a grotesque reference to the march theme in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad". But that tends to fall under any or all of artistic license, parody, or the copyright laws not having been implemented as seriously in their day.)

[Jacob]

Oct 6, 2011 7:19:01 GMT -5 Pacmanite said:

You mean to say that if a contemporary composer were to use something as old as Pi in their work, it would be like using something in the public domain such as a quotation from Beethoven. I think that's fair.

(To be honest, classical musicians have done a lot of sneaky quoting of their living contemporaries, even sometimes very mean and unflattering quotation. Stravinsky's Nightingale rips a bird-sounding passage from Wagner's ring cycle, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra makes a grotesque reference to the march theme in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad". But that tends to fall under any or all of artistic license, parody, or the copyright laws not having been implemented as seriously in their day.)

Glad to see someone made sense of what I was trying to say. I wondered a bit. On copyright law, this video is perhaps the quickest start to understand its intended use, and how it's used today. Copyright law has always bothered me, but that just makes my skin crawl.

[Clocky: Activity is a Thing]

>>copyrighting a song that uses a common-knowledge mathematical concept
>>claiming that also copyrights the mathematical concept whenever sung

Be advised: an error in logic has been detected.

(Yes, that's an over-simplification with just a dash of conjecture, but, personally, this sounds kind of—dumb. I mean, if it's the actual theft of your work, that's one thing; if it's just saying, “I sung Pi in a piece that used x properties of Pi in its composition, so you can't use that same idea ever, even though both of our works would technically be derivative, and there are considerable differences in our mutual executions of such,” it's ridiculous. Was there actually any profit being gained on Blake's part, anyway?)

[Jacob]

Oct 28, 2011 22:37:41 GMT -5 Clocky: Activity is a Thing said:

>>copyrighting a song that uses a common-knowledge mathematical concept
>>claiming that also copyrights the mathematical concept whenever sung

Be advised: an error in logic has been detected.

(Yes, that's an over-simplification with just a dash of conjecture, but, personally, this sounds kind of—dumb. I mean, if it's the actual theft of your work, that's one thing; if it's just saying, “I sung Pi in a piece that used x properties of Pi in its composition, so you can't use that same idea ever, even though both of our works would technically be derivative, and there are considerable differences in our mutual executions of such,” it's ridiculous. Was there actually any profit being gained on Blake's part, anyway?)

I don't think the money is an issue, so much as the inane logic being used. Again, I believe they are both working off of what could be considering sheet music, devised by mathematicians for them to use as they saw fit. Which would fall under current Public Domain law.

And hey, this is what Tau sounds like. Anyone feel like suing Mike for this as well?