Saturday, March 14, 2015

Have A Happy Pi Day! (Just Don't Set It to Music)

As you are obviously aware, if you read this blog or troll any other mathematically-inclined site, today is The Pi Day of Our Lives!

Don't worry, now! I'm not about to invoke a similar sounding song title by One Direction (although I did consider it) because I've used that song before. That's why I settled for Row, Row, Row Your Boat" yesterday. I made a little comment in that comic that I want to expand upon.

Did you know: you could take the digits 0-9 and map them to musical notes and by extension fill pages of music sheets with the first few hundred digits/notes of pi?

Did you know: if you did this, you could be sued for copyright infringement?

Because you wouldn't have been the first one to have the idea. Someone else did, and he recorded it, copyrighted it, and has defended that copyright against anyone who tried it later. Now, I realize that copyright is an important thing and that compositions need to be protected and all that ... But come on now!!!

This wasn't an original work created from the artist's soul. It's a series of numbers.

So while the law will tell you that he copyrighted a musical composition, your mind wants to scream "He copyrighted pi?"

Which is the reason I explicitly stated yesterday that the copyright applied only to the image and not to the numbers therein.

But what a thought that'd be!

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