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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

The celebrity angle is interesting here. I eventually killed a little product because it was too hard to legally acquire face shots of celebrities and it just didn't have enough zing without pictures by names.

If enough celebrities used Instagram, and Instagram could figure out their accounts, they could open autopaparazzi.com.

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What? There are plenty of photo services that will license you photos of celebrities. Getty Images for one. We're not talking about publicity shy people here.

It depends on the use. If you are using the photos for news purposes, then yes, this works. But if you are using it for commercial purposes, then you would also need a release showing that the person (celebrity or not) received sufficient compensation for the use of their likeness. Without that, you can be sued very easily.

I think that's less the issue here than CBS likely holding the commercial rights to Kaley Cuoco and Melissa Rauch being used together in anything that would look like an ad.

Presumably it will be in violation of Instagram's TOS to post the kind of pic that he talks about. (See Rights 4.(ii) )

But as he alludes to, it should make it interesting when someone does.

Wikipedia? And surely you could just buy shots of them?

Maybe there were too many to reasonably buy for a small product, or maybe the names were generated 'on the fly'?

Quantity, price, administrative overhead, and dynamic creation all played into it.

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