Owning the Rights to Pi

Pi Day, March 14th, is a cute way we math instructors celebrate the great irrational giant pi. Most instructors celebrate by simply wearing a pi button or greeting their coworkers in “Happy Pi Day”. Other, more creative math enthusiasts engage in neat arts and crafts. One particularly creative individual, Michael Blake, decided to make a cute song based on pi.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/14/134492882/how-to-transform-the-number-pi-into-a-song  

His approach? He decided the song would be in C, then assigned each note a number: C=1, D=2 and so on up through 9. Using those assignments, he played the sequence of pi: 3.14159 through 31 decimal places. He assigned numbers to chords, too, but could only play the chords every other note and still make it sound vaguely musical.

Finally, he used pi as the basis for the tempo — it's 157 beats per minute, which is half of 314. He played this part on several instruments, as you can see in the video above, and layered them to make a song. The result isn't exactly catchy, but it's certainly melodic.

The song quickly became a viral youtube hit but until it was pulled from the site for copyright infringement; it seems that you can own pi?

Sadly, Lars Erickson, in embodying the arrogance that is intellectual property, decided that the concept of pi-music was his idea based on a pi-melody he wrote 20 years prior stating

“"I am not interested in suppressing the melody of Pi, or copyrighting the number, Pi. I simply filed a copyright on the melody when I devoted a considerable amount of time writing the Pi Symphony. I have spoken to Michael Blake and his actions of removing comments referring to Pi Symphony was what spurred me to action. Heck, I am sure we can work this out, but right now, 1:59 is right around the corner, so how about a momentary cease fire."”