As mentioned, any expectation of not being photgraphed is reduced in public. Also, celebrities qualify as “news” and it has never AFIAK been the law that news photographs require approval or a release from the subject before publication. That drifts perilously close to “prior restraint,” which is something we tend to avoid under the First Amendment.
You also don’t specifically need their permission to draw them. You are free to draw pictures of Britney and Christina all the live-long day and there’s most likely not thing one they can do about it. The issue is your use of copyrighted images as the basis of your drawings which may run afoul of copyright law and your marketing your drawings which may also run afoul of copyright law as well as B and C’s right of publicity.
And why would anyone want a picture of Paris Hilton’s cat getting out of a car?
If you’re serious about doing this, you really should contact a lawyer who can examine your image and evaluate the actual risk. The opinions of strangers on a messageboard are no substitute for legal advice from your lawyer, no matter our expertise.
And to be serious about the nudity issue, it may not in fact be all right to publish a photo of PH’s nether regions anyway. See for example Brad Pitt’s successful lawsuit against Playgirl magazine, forcing them to halt distribution of an issue which featured nude photos of him taken without his knowledge or consent. Of course it was far too late to prevent the photos from being distributed (and had in fact been available on the internet for some time prior to Playgirl’s publishing them but that’s beside the point for purposes of this discussion). IIRC Alyssa Milano also was successful in forcing a number of websites to remove unauthorized nude screen caps of her (again, too late to prevent their distribution but again irrelevant to my point).
I worked for a newspaper very, very briefly, and I asked about how the paper may use pictures of people. Without going into legal cites, I was told that the paper had a virtually free hand in publishing what it wanted to so long as the pictures were not altered and it could be argued, in whatever infetesimal way, that the pictures represented “news.” Whether such pictures should be published was a question of journalism, not of laws.
From that I’m led to believe that taking pictures of so-and-so going on a drunken rage, flashing, or sunbathing topless could, in a loose sense, be considered news, espeically if the person is a public figure. I don’t see how that judgment could be made for something that is a work of art and creative expression, not a snapshot (literally and figurtively) of what has transpired in the world.
So you’re saying that if Britney is standing on the red carpet outside of some awards show, and I take a photograph of her, and the guy next to me makes a sketch of her, the law says it’s fine for me to sell or print the photo, but the guy next to me is potentially in legal trouble if he sells his sketch to The Enquirer? If that’s true, then the law is even more arbitrary and meaningless than I’d thought.
Evil Captor. For my money, your OP has been asked and answered as well as can be by this board.l
This forum is for questions that have a factual answer. You have had factual answers to most of your questions. If you dont like the answers you got, then start a carefully worded thread in the Pit about how unfair you think copyright and trademark laws are.