Physicist’s Heirs Sue Caltech Over Lecture Rights
The heirs of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman filed a copyright infringement suit Monday against Caltech, two faculty members and a book publisher over the use of the late professor’s papers.
The federal court suit revolves around the publication of a book titled “Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of the Planets Around the Sun.”
Authored by Caltech Vice Provost David Goodstein and archivist Judith Goodstein, the book contains substantial verbatim excerpts from one of Feynman’s lectures and is packaged with an audio recording of the physicist delivering the talk.
Caltech, where Feynman did much of his research, copyrighted the work and W. W. Norton & Co. of New York was the publisher.
In their suit, Michelle Feynman, the scientist’s daughter, and Carl Feynman, his son, claim that they own the rights to his lectures.
Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965, donated many of his papers to Caltech during his lifetime. After his death in 1988, the family negotiated an agreement with the university governing use of the papers, the lawsuit says.
Caltech, according to the agreement, would be able to display the papers and make them available to researchers. However, the suit says, the 1993 agreement specified that the family would retain copyrights and profits derived from publication.
Max Benavidez, a Caltech spokesman, said university lawyers had not seen the suit and would have no immediate comment. He said the Goodsteins, who are married, are out of the country.
David Goodstein, a physicist, was a protege of Feynman. “In a million years, I can’t imagine he would have done anything that violated an understanding concerning Dr. Feynman’s papers,” Benavidez said.
Although the Feynman heirs said they were unable to determine their monetary loss, they said it exceeded $500,000. Feynman taught at Caltech for 36 years. He took part in the Manhattan Project, the World War II program that developed the atomic bomb. He was a member of the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger space shuttle explosion.
