Physics & Math / Einstein

Image courtesy of Xump.com

Albert Einstein is big business. Walk into any science museum store and you’ll find Einstein magnets, posters, spoons, books, CDs, finger puppets and dolls—all offered for a price. For the second year running, Forbes ranked Albert Einstein fifth on the list of top-earning dead celebrities, with $18 million worth of Einstein product changing hands. But how does this enterprise—this Einstein Inc.—work, and where does all the money go?

The vast majority of Einstein-generated cash comes from a single company—Disney-owned Baby Einstein, whose toys and educational DVDs can be found wherever there’s a onesie or a pacifier for sale. Royalties from these products plus the animated television show Little Einsteins add up to a hefty sum without even using the great physicist’s image or ever mentioning his work. True Einstein connoisseurs, meanwhile, can enjoy the quiet thrill of returning home from the gift shop with a new Einstein calendar for tracking personal space-time and Einstein sticky notes for jotting down brilliant ideas while Einstein looks down from a poster on the wall. Parched lips? You can apply some Einstein Lip Therapy (more on this later).

Yet just as Einstein’s universe was a warped, dimpled, and deformed affair, so too is the landscape of Einstein commerce. Amid all the coffee mugs and other paraphernalia, there’s a vastly complicated side to the enterprise left in Einstein’s wake. To make almost anything Einstein—be it product, product name, or advertisement —you must first get past a small but powerful cabal that has included a marketing firm in Beverly Hills, the upper echelon of Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a company owned by another Forbes top earner (a living one): Bill Gates. This formidable group can put the kibosh on a wide range of Einstein products, flying, perhaps, in the face of the “free, unhampered exchange of ideas” that Einstein favored in “all spheres of cultural life.”

All of this was set in motion with Einstein’s death in 1955. Under the terms of his will, his estate eventually went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ), where he had been one of the first governors. Long after his death, new laws in the United States gave the university exclusive postmortem rights to profit from the Einstein name and image and the control of the Einstein “brand.” To represent its interests in Einstein’s commercial worth, the university worked with The Roger Richman Agency in Beverly Hills, whose mission was to protect the estate interests of such legendary figures as the Wright brothers, Rudolph Valentino, and Sigmund Freud. Einstein was in excellent company when, in April 2005, Richman was purchased by Corbis, a photo agency founded and owned by Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

Over the years, Richman and Corbis have protected the Einstein image with threats to anyone who came within a quark of using anything Einstein without approval. Take Quoteland.com. David Borenstein started the quotation reference site when he was 15, back in the heady days of the Internet boom. The site featured several Einstein quips that enlightened and entertained its visitors without incident for two years. But when Borenstein began to offer engravings of the Einstein quotes, he received a letter from the Richman agency on behalf of HUJ that began, “It has come to our attention that you are operating the Web site Quote­land.com, Inc., noting several quotes of Dr. Einstein.” Soon after, “we got the phone call threatening us with fire and brimstone,” says Borenstein, who now works in computational genomics at MIT. “They were asking us to hand over all our records and a percentage of anything I’d made on the site. We hadn’t sold a single Einstein quote at that point.” Though a lawyer friend assured Borenstein that he was in the clear, he did not relish a costly legal battle. He removed the quotes and soon after sold the site. “It’s directly against the principles that Einstein seemed to stand for,” Borenstein says.

Tony Rothman, a faculty member at Princeton University, was equally surprised and indignant when, shortly before his book Everything’s Relative: And Other Fables From Science and Technology went to press, his editors decided to nix the cover photo of Einstein. Though Wiley, the publisher, had paid Corbis to use the photo of Einstein holding a pipe and looking heavenward, it had not paid to use Einstein’s image in general and feared the litigation power of the Einstein estate. Rothman was appalled. “Bill Gates is getting richer off Einstein—I find this totally absurd,” he says. “Do these laws make any distinction between ‘celebrity’ celeb­rity and a scientist’s celebrity?

“Suppose I were at a conference and I took a picture of Niels Bohr and Einstein. What if Einstein gave me a picture of himself? Would I have to pay to use it?”