Can I put Pi (3.14) in my name so that I get money every time Pi appears on television?

Answer

3.14 is only a very rough approximation of the number pi, but other than that, you’re very unlikely to succeed.

You are not eligible for a patent. After all, patents are granted for inventions, and this is not an invention but a number. You can’t invent numbers, they just exist. Plus, you’re not the first to use the number pi. In any case, this is called ‘prior art’, which means that the number pi was used long before that. Since you have to be the first to do something new for a patent application, and the number pi has been around since Archimedes, you are hopelessly too late.

You also cannot protect it separately under copyright. What you can do is write a whole paragraph about the number pi. That entire paragraph is then protected by copyright, and anyone who would copy that entire paragraph without your permission could be convicted. But this does not only apply to the number from that paragraph: otherwise people could also claim copyright on the words ‘the’, ‘the’, ‘a’. So when you read a math book, you can use small bits of it (such as proofs, because they are usually copied from other works), but not whole chapters or a long explanation, because they are protected under copyright.

The only option left is to try to register it as a trademark. It is possible to file historical data as a trademark, but this offers only partial protection: it must be applied for by a company, and only protects against the use of the trademark by competitors in the same industry.

To give an example: ING bank has protected the color combination white-orange in the Benelux. This does not mean that no one is allowed to use white or orange anymore, just that no other bank in the Benelux is allowed to use those specific colors in advertising or publications. Nestlé has protected Vermeer’s painting ‘the milkmaid’, so that no other food company may use this painting for publicity. It is possible to have music (jingles) recognized as a trademark: in 2003 a trademark office had Van Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ protected as a trademark. Anyone can still listen to or play this piece without any problems, except that other trademark offices are no longer allowed to use it as a promotion.

However, Harley-Davidson failed to protect the sound of a Harley because it was not musical: a brand has to be symbolically noteworthy in some way. Since the number pi can be registered symbolically, it is theoretically possible to register the symbol pi or the number series pi as a trademark. But you will probably also have to define fonts, font sizes, etc., so that it ultimately does not work. After all, a brand only protects you against direct competitors, not against society. Journalists, writers, ordinary people, and companies that are not a direct competitor of your company will therefore be able to use the number pi without any problems, just like I can write about Coca-Cola here without having to pay the Coca-Cola Company. The only thing I can’t do is paste their logo with the curly letters into this text.

I think you’ll save yourself the trouble. Even if you manage to register (a drawing of) the number pi as a trademark, you must still be very lucky if a competitor of yours uses it in exactly the same way as you, so that it constitutes an infringement of trademark law. Any damages you can get from this, you will probably all be able to hand over to the army of lawyers that you need to register trademarks and conduct the necessary lawsuits. You will never see a cent from the ordinary man/woman in the street.