Owning a Face

June 3, 2022 11:16 PM

"Einstein’s work as a humanitarian, philosopher, pacifist and anti-racist continued throughout his life. Today Einstein’s fingerprints can be found on many of the technologies that make the modern world work, from lasers to the semi-conductors that power your smartphone. But in the public eye at least, it is Einstein’s image that has most conspicuously endured." The fight to control his image.
posted by blue shadows (22 comments total)

I feel like it obviously would have bothered him? He was deeply ambivalent while alive about the way he became a symbol; having his face slapped on any cheaply-made junk that someone might pony up a few dollars for as a empty symbol of "intelligence" would have been his nightmare.

> Richman resented the fact that he was often depicted in court and the press as a “marketing ghoul”.

One way to avoid this is to, y'know, not be a ghoul. I don't even really understand the justification for copyright that extends past the life of the author, tbh; the idea that anyone owns the rights to a dead person's likeness is just patently ridiculous.
posted by protocoach at 12:24 AM on June 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

the idea that anyone owns the rights to a dead person's likeness is just patently ridiculous.

earlier this week...
posted by DreamerFi at 4:17 AM on June 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I never understood why people liked THAT particular image anyway? 🤔

Great article, thank you!
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:10 AM on June 4, 2022

the idea that anyone owns the rights to a dead person's likeness is just patently ridiculous.

I don’t know. I remember relatives of Frida Kahlo being upset specifically about a Frida-branded tequila being sold because she was an alcoholic. Should things like that be fair game?
posted by girlmightlive at 5:39 AM on June 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

I was also thinking about Frida Kahlo. Her image is on an astonishing amount of random things.
posted by 41swans at 5:44 AM on June 4, 2022

Should things like that be fair game?

They should be considered quite distasteful, but yes.

If you want to name your white noise machine "Mozart," that's allowed. No one owns the name Cleopatra, or Suleiman, etc. These were real people just as much as Einstein was, and they're icons just as much as he is.

We either need laws outlawing a person's likeness without their explicit consent altogether, or else we need to stop granting ownership to an "estate" upon death. These laws exist to protect the privacy and dignity of a person while they live. Once they're dead, they have no means of suffering indignity.

The laws as they are today are a capitalist contortion of good intent.
posted by explosion at 6:32 AM on June 4, 2022 [12 favorites]

Then you’d have to argue is anyone out there today that could claim to be harmed by a Mozart white noise machine.

I do think the passage of time should play a role in this.

Just because the decedent isn’t around to “feel” indignity doesn’t mean it can’t be felt by their loved ones and I think that should count for something.

Personally, my dad isn’t famous enough for anyone here to know his name but he is a bit famous locally, and one of our major museums has archived some of his photography.

I’d be livid if upon his death they used his photos in a way that he’d object to. I’d be even more livid at the justification that he’s dead and can’t feel feelings anymore.

I can understand the arguments practically but it doesn’t seem workable to me at all, due to how we process grief and the expectations regarding our families and our legacies.
posted by girlmightlive at 6:51 AM on June 4, 2022 [8 favorites]

I agree with that sentiment. And in that spirit, I think I'd honestly be more inclined toward laws that outlawed posthumous use of a likeness than estate-licensed use.

Let the dead be dead, rather than Stan Lee showing up to hawk one more product from beyond the grave because someone paid $1M to his "estate."
posted by explosion at 7:50 AM on June 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

I guess this is yet another example of why capitalism needs to be very strictly regulated.
posted by mikelieman at 8:20 AM on June 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

explosion: "Let the dead be dead, rather than Stan Lee showing up to hawk one more product from beyond the grave because someone paid $1M to his "estate.""

I see your point, but I think Stan would probably like the idea of continuing to sell stuff even after death.
posted by signal at 8:54 AM on June 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Einstein was a good friend of Paul Robeson and they worked together on anti-lynching laws. He also said, ""As for the immigrants, they are the ones to whom it can be accounted a merit to be Americans. For they have had to take trouble for their citizenship, whereas it has cost the majority nothing at all to be born in the land of civic freedom."
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:18 AM on June 4, 2022 [8 favorites]

I'm against claims based on family names that a number of people share; the Einstein Bros.' bagel shop, for instance. (It would be interesting to see Albert Brooks, whose birth name is Albert Einstein, take on something like that.) On the other hand, I'm also looking a bit askance at people crying "creative freedom" when they're just trying to make money by riding on someone's coattails. If the book that leads off TFA was good enough, it shouldn't need to exploit the image of History's Official Smartest Man to sell a few copies. The article kind of skirts around this, but a lot of the case law behind this really began when Bela Lugosi Jr. got mad at the number of people making a buck off of his father's image when the senior Lugosi died in poverty and addiction.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:10 AM on June 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Einstein’s fingerprints can be found on many of the technologies that make the modern world work

At least they're not his tongue-prints...
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:07 PM on June 4, 2022

I don't even really understand the justification for copyright that extends past the life of the author, tbh;

This one isn't that complicated, actually. If you're a writer in the 19th or early 20th century, the milieu in which much of modern copyright law was being worked out, you're probably not pulling in a lot of money from the initial publication of your works. But by earning royalties on your work throughout your lifetime, the labor you put in while you're young can help support you and your family for the rest of your life. If you have a family and then die young, copyright laws recognize that the work you did during your life was intended in part to support that family, and if copyright were to expire with the author, that young family's tragedy would be compounded by the loss of planned royalties. Since the purpose of copyright laws is to incentivize authors to create by allowing them to benefit economically from their work, it would be counterproductive if professional authors had to decide whether to risk their family's future by gambling on their own longetivity.

The problem isn't that copyright extends past the life of the author, it's that the context in which copyright law and theory was originally constructed was largely in a pre-Disney (et al.) era. Today, the vast majority of economically valuable intellectual property is owned by a few megacorporations. While extended copyright can still serve a valuable role in giving authors some assurance that their work will help to provide some financial security to their inheritors, it's pretty clear that the megacorporations are abusing this system to ensure that works that long ago should have entered the public domain (e.g., Mickey Mouse) remain under their control in perpetuity. In my opinion, it would be preferable to rework the law to allow individuals to hold extended copyrights, but place stricter limits on the lifetimes of copyrights held by corporations. This of course is never going to happen.

Anyway, all of this applies to more conventionally-interpreted "works" with respect to intellectual property. The idea that a "likeness" can be intellectual property, and the consequences seen here with respect to Einstein's posthumous likeness and publicity rights, is a different morass entirely.
posted by biogeo at 12:08 PM on June 4, 2022

The obvious solution is to implement damnatio memoriae universally, to prevent any possibility of misusing the likenesses of the dead.
posted by kaibutsu at 3:34 PM on June 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is classic rent-seeking... i.e. something even theorists of capitalism think is bad. Copyrights and trademarks have a social purpose: encouraging creation, discovery, and ideas. Making money because you own the "rights" to a dead celebrity does not produce anything of value; it's just skimming money off things the rightsholder did not make.

Admittedly the Einstein diapers are a tasteless idea. But inventing a whole dead-celebrity-exploitation industry is not the answer to that problem, if it even needs one.
posted by zompist at 8:44 PM on June 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

the Hebrew University continues to profit from Einstein’s name, likeness – even his silhouette.

this is a fucked up antisemitic framing, not surprising from the guardian. he assigned his rights to the university, albeit he couldn't know how IP would play out in today's world. but please, Guardian, shut the fuck up.
posted by wibari at 11:35 PM on June 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oldie: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/31111669/Einstein-on-God
posted by 3.2.3 at 6:11 AM on June 5, 2022

i have a related little chat with the outsized face of che guevara every time my run takes me past the exterior wall of the giant restuarant selling presumably overpriced apparently cuban food to yuppies and tourists while che does his implacable stare into the distance over the heads of the people trying to make a living by asking for spare change from the sort of people who might eat there. he doesn't look too excited about the situation but i'm guessing his problems with the vulture ecosystem have higher-priority sub-problems than the perverse usage of famous likenesses.
posted by busted_crayons at 7:13 AM on June 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would've taken better care of the Einstein socks I was gifted if I'd known the vendor was risking a big lawsuit by selling them! Although maybe they were licensed, google tells me I could buy more if I wanted.

I'm not 100% sure where I'd draw the line but after a person, their spouse/partners, and all their children are long dead it seems well past the point to exert ownership. Among other things, it's a weird and superficial focus: I could misunderstand, belittle, expand upon, etc., Einstein's actual body of work however the heck I want, but his unkempt mane is sacred.

Then you’d have to argue is anyone out there today that could claim to be harmed by a Mozart white noise machine.

What's the argument that someone is "hurt" by Einstein diapers or socks, let alone his face on the cover of a book about science and technology? Except in the narrow sense that there exists people who might have otherwise been able to exploit the legal grey area to shake people down for money and thus it "hurts" them not to be able to do that.
posted by mark k at 5:13 PM on June 5, 2022

This is fascinating. I'm not a historian. But, I've read most of what Einstein wrote and have had lunch with the Einstein Papers Project folks a few times. This sure seems surprising. He wasn't a kind or thoughtful guy in many ways, but he sure as hell didn't care about this nonsense. The lesson from this seems to be: make your will incredibly explicit.

His intellect made Einstein famous, but it was his appearance that made him an icon.

That's devastatingly sad to hear. I'm not sure it's not true.

When Richman discovered that a chain of stores owned by Universal City Studios sold a sweatshirt with the slogan “E=mc2: Shit Happens”, he successfully had the sweatshirt banned, and forced Universal to pay $25,000 in damages.

Fuck that shit. When you discover a fundamental law, your grandchildren don't get to claim copyright, no matter how stupid the T-shirt is. E=mc^2 isn't something Einstein invented. It's the way the universe is. The judge who allowed this is an idiot.
posted by eotvos at 8:54 AM on June 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

eotvos: That's even more stunning considering that Einstein didn't even use that terminology in his original paper.

Although even if he did, yes, you cannot lay claim on a mathematical relationship. That's an insane precedent.

As for Einstein's fame, well, his name comes up all the time in Physics. Even if the public hadn't been taken by him and his appearance the work he did was really astounding. What I like to tell people is that Einstein got a Nobel but it wasn't for Relativity, either Special or GR - both groundbreaking theories - but for his foundational work in Quantum Mechanics via the Photo-Electric effect. And then of course there's that third paper he published in 1905 on Brownian motion which laid the foundations for non-linear dynamics and explained the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So, there's a body of work there for at least 4 distinct Nobel prizes, if anyone is counting.

Of course, he later turned against QM, which he helped found, and started attacking it. But his attacks were also brilliant. His EPR paradox led to the study of entanglement which is now the basis of quantum computing.

I could go on but, basically, he really was that good.
posted by vacapinta at 1:18 AM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]