Where to Find a Free Celebrity Picture for Your Next Blog Post (2024)

Copyright lawyers have this joke: “A picture is worth a thousand words, but a copyright-protected picture is only worth three words: cease and desist.”

I didn’t laugh when I first read it because I am a chicken when it comes to taking legal risks.

But, as a writer, I still have to use images in every article to support my storytelling and to reach my audience. And for my recent post, I needed pictures of five entrepreneurial celebrities: Ben Horowitz, Gary Vee, Seth Godin, Cal Newport, and Darren Hardy.

I could grab some pictures from Instagram, Twitter, or a Newspaper and then splash them into my article. But my inner chicken was clucking me to do some research into copyright beforehand.

Look, I am not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice. But here are the two striking things I discovered.

First, the consequences of infringing on someone else’s copyright are not a joke. Charges can go as high as $150,000 for each violation, excluding all attorney fees and court costs. In extreme cases, the copyright violator can face jail time.

Now, I haven’t heard of any writer who had to go to jail for illegally posting an image of a celebrity, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful.

Second, I discovered easy, free, and legal ways to reuse celebrity photos. I will demonstrate them later.

But first, let’s start by busting a few myths about copyright.

It is tempting to reuse images you find on the internet. The problem is most of the visuals out there are protected by copyright.

Copyright is “a federal law that protects original works of authorship. A work of authorship includes literary, written, dramatic, artistic, musical, and certain other types of works.”

Copyright applies as soon as someone creates an original piece of artwork. This happens regardless of whether a professional camera or a smartphone was used.