This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

My name's Simon Parkin.

I'm the author of Who Owns Einstein, the Battle for the World's Most Famous Face,

first published by The Guardian in 2022.

So I first got interested in the story about who owns the rights to Einstein's face when someone

I know who works at the Science Museum, a creator, mentioned that they had been planning

to use Einstein in the publicity for an exhibition that they had coming up, when suddenly someone

who was more senior at the museum advised the team to take Einstein's face off the publicity.

And when he asked why, they said it's because the people who own the rights to it are extremely litigious.

And it'll just be simpler for us if we don't use Einstein.

And it was just sort of one of those little nuggets of information that was enough to take me into the whole question of, is it possible to own the rights to a famous but

deceased person's image? And if so, who owns Einstein and why are they so litigious about it?

So yeah, that's what led me into this whole world.

One other reason that this article seemed timely when I wrote it in 2022 is because at that time,

the British government was running a national campaign for smart meters that used a 3D digitised

model of Einstein interacting with various British stage actors to kind of sell

the benefits and merits of smart meters. That campaign is still going, so it's on television all

the time, I think, and in print as well. And in the small print at the end of the advert, it always

says, worse, the effect of the advert, it always says,

worse, the effect of Einstein's image is owned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And so

that's not changed. However, I finish the article by saying that anyone who's interested in

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