On 8/3/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
There are enough celebrity photographers in Los Angeles to last a lifetime of free images if we could set up a rapport with them to release some of their less-likely-to-be-commercially-viable images under free licenses. Free exposure and circulation for them, free images for us. I don't see how they'd have anything to lose (and it is not as if the places they would sell their photos to regularly are going to suddenly want to re-license their whole magazine as CC-BY-SA either, so the odds of it even competing with their regular business is pretty low).
That actually sounds fairly plausible. I'm an expert on LA paparazzi after having seen a half-hour documentary on them. One thing I recall was that a good clean photo doing something fairly controversial (eg, drunk outside a club) was worth in the $500 range. A shot of a celebrity just not wanting to be shot was like $100, and a posed celebrity shot was like $50 or less. And all this is presuming that the photos would be published in the week or so afterwards.
The chances of a photographer having old (2-3 years), boring, plain "Hi, my name is Paris Hilton" shots lying around that they would hand over for "not much" sounds pretty good to me. We just need to work out what exactly we can offer them in return.
To that end, we could improve our crediting system. We could explicitly say "Wikipedia thanks the following professional photographers for their graceful contributions". I don't believe that would be at all contradictory to our mission.
Steve