Steve Bennett wrote:
We're talking about publicity shots aren't we? As in, photos that are provided to the media so they can write puff pieces about them...presumably the publicist owns the copyright, and presumably it is legal for the media to use them this way. So presumably also legal for Wikipedia to use them as the lead image for relevant articles. But possibly not legal for downstream Wikipedia content reusers...
Publicity shots usually come with some kind of limited permission to use in news articles or whatever; not necessarily to use on a t-shirt - or on the front cover of a biography in wikibooks.
I think a worse problem is mislabeling - every magazine and news agency photographer takes all kinds of publicity-shot-like photos of the person they're featuring that month, and those guys would not be pleased at WP usage. Worse, the photographer is almost never credited, so the visibility of WP usage doesn't even help their careers.
Stan