I read somewhere on the interwebs that Paul Ingrisano, the owner of the New York apparel company Pi Apparels, had requested the trademark of the letter pi (π) back in 2012. When the online retail store Frazzle was selling t-shirts with pi on them in May of this year, a cease-and-desist letter was issued which basically enforced the trademark of “π.” and shut down the selling of those shirts. Opposition saw the trademark as “asinine” and akin to the woman who tried to claim copyright of the sun.

This is totally legit. U.S. Registration No. 4473631 is the trademark for pi followed by a period.

You may now rage in civil manner.

Edit 1: You can only copyright material that has a known author or creator (not a group). Pi was invented by the Greeks thousands of years ago; exactly who created the symbol for pi remains a mystery.

I think I'll go copyright the space character.

Just when I thought humanity had already hit the pinnacle of ‘stupid’…

What an irrational situation.

wow thats amazing ^_^

Isn't humanity great?

Now a Greek letter, obviously owned by Greeks, now belongs to some guy with the IQ of 2 and more money than we could make in a lifetime!



…I hate this planet.

Did you know a guy once sued a lawn mower company because it did not say on the lawn mower that he could not pick it up and trim his bushes with it? He tried to and it fell on him and cut him.

Message terminated.

Curious, where did you find this article? I can't find anything on the cease-and-desist against a store called Frazzle. Did you mean Zazzle?

Based on the trademark info, only “π.” (the symbol with the period) is trademarked, not “π” (as in the symbol without the period, which cannot be copyrighted, trademarked, etc.). To my best knowledge of trademark law, most Pi merchandise should be safe unless it had a period it at the end of it, and that the trademark owner cannot really legally go after Pi products unless it has a period at the end of it (and this would probably be only limited to only the sports apparel products based on what the trademark says. And then only to stuff that came out after the trademark was established, not before). Which, as far as what I know about the Zazzle incident, that isn't what the trademark owner is doing.

Kind of reminds me of the time the “Animation Hall of Fame” museum wasn't happy with the Scratch studio of the same name, and still not happy even when the ST offered to change the name to “Scratch Animation Hall of Fame”.