Microsoft's Audacious Bid to Copyright a Mathematical Constant

Description

This image is a screenshot of a satirical news article with the headline, 'Microsoft to Copyright Pi, Found to Contain Entire Arial Font.' The text humorously claims that Microsoft has discovered its proprietary Arial font encoded within the decimal expansion of the mathematical constant pi (π), starting at the 3,141,592nd decimal place. The article invents a 'Dr. Calibri' (a pun on the Microsoft font) who explains the 'discovery' involved interpreting digit sequences as SVG path instructions. Consequently, Microsoft's legal team is filing a copyright claim on the number itself. The article concludes with a punchline that 'Google is rumored to be searching for Roboto hidden within the digits of e.' This is a sophisticated piece of satire that mocks corporate intellectual property overreach by applying it to the absurd concept of owning a fundamental, irrational number. The humor is aimed at an audience that understands the properties of transcendental numbers, font rendering technology (SVG, Bézier curves), and the corporate rivalry between Microsoft and Google

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MicrosoftProducts TechSatire IntellectualProperty Corporate

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick I'm not worried. The Pi File System has infinite storage, but the `seek()` operation has an O(N) complexity where N is the starting decimal, and nobody has that kind of time

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

I'm not worried. The Pi File System has infinite storage, but the `seek()` operation has an O(N) complexity where N is the starting decimal, and nobody has that kind of time
Anonymous

If Microsoft can copyright the π offset that reconstructs Arial, how long before calling sin() in production triggers a lawyer’s telemetry ping - proof that Kolmogorov complexity now ships with an enterprise EULA
Anonymous

Next week's announcement: Oracle discovers the Fibonacci sequence contains their entire database licensing agreement, retroactively billing nature itself for unauthorized replication across pinecones and nautilus shells
Anonymous

This brilliantly skewers the tech industry's IP maximalism by extending copyright logic to its absurd conclusion - if you can encode data in anything, you can claim ownership of everything. The '3,141,592nd decimal place' detail and the fictional 'Dr. Calibri' (named after Microsoft's default font) are chef's kiss touches. It's the perfect commentary on how Big Tech's legal departments have become more aggressive than their engineering teams, and how we've reached a point where claiming ownership of mathematical constants feels only slightly more ridiculous than some actual IP lawsuits. The Google/Roboto/e punchline nails the competitive one-upmanship that defines FAANG culture - because of course they'd try to copyright a different fundamental constant
Anonymous

Microsoft can copyright π because its digits decode to Arial Béziers? Cool - Legal just made normal numbers a supply‑chain risk, so we replaced circles with taxicab geometry and called it compliance
Anonymous

Pi's decimals encoding Arial via SVG Béziers? Microsoft's ultimate type pun: infinite glyphs, zero public domain
Anonymous

Legal just found the shortest way to ship Arial: pi.seek(3_141_592).decode('svg'); compliance now wants royalties per floating point
@mpolovnev 2y

So, napstering Metallica music is not a crime, the music was encoded in Pi even before Hetfield's birth!
1. @SamsonovAnton 2y
  
  Unfortunately, douchebag lawmakers invented such thing as illegal numbers.
@VanuxaKR 2y

🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓 If something has infinite expansion, it doesn't mean it will contain anything Counter example: A number that has a repeated string 123456789 divided by increasing in size string of zeroes: 0.123456789012345678900123456789000... 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
1. @leRotten 2y
  
  This is not a problem as you have an infinite sequence of numbers without repeatable patterns (as we are dealing with an irrational number by definition). I have tried to implement that PI-file system 10 years ago and reached very obvious limitation: scientist have been calculated a millions of PI digits, but that roughly means that we have only several megabytes in file equivalence. And you guess - it's hard to find a lot of files inside several MB 😁 Even if you will try to search only parts of file you can reach fast ping when your "archived" data (offsets and lengths ) takes more size that original
  
  Felix 2y
  
  I guess it only serves to claim that there cannot be any drm
  
  @leRotten 2y
  
  Why? You can ship drm content to client and decode it via secure device only, so original data will be safe. And if you are trying to say that any content can be found inside the PI digits - good luck to white a "content miner" 😂 That's same effective like trying to find movie by slapping random data until it matches the hash... Btw you can try to repurpose mining farm for this, still that may be not worth it
  
  @mira_the_cat 2y
  
  haven't like trillion of pi digits been calculated?
  
  @leRotten 2y
  
  Oh, you are correct, they have calculated a lot more since I touched this topic... Then, you can ignore my complains of only several MB of data equivalent, and just download calculated Pi to find something useful in it! That's amazing feeling that something became better in ten years
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  You can start calculation now starting from any arbitrary position. Look up Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe algorithm And yes, it’s made specifically for hexadecimal representation of Pi
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  Actually it seems Simon Plouffe found how to calculate Nth number even in decimal, fantastic! https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Digit-ExtractionAlgorithm.html
  
  dev_meme 2y
  
  Wanna calculate 29385293592394230114512590129059120940912410294901290491024190249011092904109920409th digit of Pi after the dot? You got covered!
  
  @purplesyringa 2y
  
  This very much is a problem: there are infinite sequences of numbers without repeatable patterns that don't contain some of the patterns. For example, the string 011011100101110111... does not contain a 2 despite not being cyclic
  
  @purplesyringa 2y
  
  In fact, it is an open problem whether pi contains an arbitrary number as a substring
  
  @sylfn 2y
  
  (what base system do you consider?)
  
  @purplesyringa 2y
  
  Any base
  
  @leRotten 2y
  
  You will find any number on the infinity scale. That's it. Just skip a lot of "wrong" digits. But real systems have no infinity space for all that digits, nor infinite time/CPUs to calculate all that digits in realtime to find your file. So theoretically you can build file system which already contains all files and can operate with offset and lengths to define a file. In practice it is just a beautiful concept shows how abstract math is cool (and how it sucks when face applied math/computational theory)
  
  @purplesyringa 2y
  
  Do you have a proof of this statement? As far as I am aware, this is an open problem
  
  @leRotten 2y
  
  That was stated ten years ago that digits in PI has even distribution, which implies any combination has same chance to occur next. I was not checking all that math myself that time, and not going to check it this time as I said that other problems will sink this idea in reality. If something changed with PI - just use any another irrational number. What reason if it will not work in real world in the end?
  
  @purplesyringa 2y
  
  It is unknown whether pi is normal. I'm not sure where you got your information from, but that's very much an unsolved problem
  
  @leRotten 2y
  
  Then, it's idea died twice 😁
  
  @purplesyringa 2y
  
  I'm not arguing that this storage method would be useless with any number, that seems clear. I just want to get the facts straight
  
  @mira_the_cat 2y
  
  don't digits in π distributed uniformly?
  
  @purplesyringa 2y
  
  Whether that's true is an open problem
2. Felix 2y
  
  Though pi has no structure afaik
Felix 2y

https://github.com/philipl/pifs
Felix 2y

how could you claim ownership if this immaterial good exists in nature? it would be like owning a number
1. @leRotten 2y
  
  That damned feds and corps will try to restrict or patent everything https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
2. @leRotten 2y
  
  Basically you can sell a photo of a mountain, as you did this photo, but you don't own the mountain itself. Same with digital content - you found it in the ocean of a random information, so you can sell it as you were first one
  
  Felix 2y
  
  but cannot forbid others to sell the same numbers
  
  @leRotten 2y
  
  Basically piracy and slavery is banned, but this does not stop them to happen 🤷‍♂ Humans do love "free" money. From my point of view any good art (movies, music, drawings, games) should be payed as if you will not support people trying make real art - you will end up with pay-to-win clones of some stupid game every where
@AmindaEU 2y

https://libraryofbabel.info/
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

LMFAO
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

You are trying to tell me, if I start generating the decimals of PI and I calculated the 3,141,591st digit the following digits will have the beizer curve parameters for each glyph face in alphabetical order? Did I understand this correctly?💀
1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  This must be next level compression then /s
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

Yeah thats true but what are the chnaces your font starts showing up at 3,141,592nd place which is also PI without a decimal point, I think thats the point (pun intended)
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

Wait this is fake
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

Since when do fake news count as memes
1. dev_meme 2y
  
  Always?
  
  @AmindaEU 2y
  
  r/NotTheOnion /s
2. dev_meme 2y
  
  Wait, how de fuck you considered second part to be real ?
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  I have no clue man tbh
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  I thought Dr. Calibri would never lie
Deleted Account 2y

that's.... 🤔🤯

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Microsoft's Audacious Bid to Copyright a Mathematical Constant

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