Quote:
[D]oes not ... the parliamentary debate go on ... in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether? Edmund Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important than they all."
-- Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841)
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You can quite easily become an ordained minister by submission of the requisite fees online or through the mail, and apparently the events over which you officiate are legally recognized. So, sure, start the press-pass presses, and crank 'em out. Put one on the dashboard of your vehicle -- maybe the parking meter attendant will swoon in the presence of a landed Fourth Estater, and forget to write you up. (More likely, he or she will hand you the citation and suggest that you drop it off on your editor's desk, and have a nice day.)
And all will probably be well until one appropriates the likeness of a non-public figure (or, without license, the rights in another, authorized depiction of that person) who is "newsworthy" only because it serves the publisher's commercial or self-interest that day, and who sees neither the honor nor the humor in the publicity or the laissez faire philosophy.
At which time the best advice is probably moot -- that one should have already made arrangements to be either rich beyond avarice, or sufficiently impecunious as to be judgment-proof.
It's not a question I've never thought about, because in my travels I've snapped a lot of photographs of people, without permission, many of which I intend to one day use in some way as reference materials. If it's a shot of a group of elderly men in a Beijing park, dressed in Mao-inspired fashion and poring over a mah-jhong game unfolding on the ground in their midst, I feel pretty "safe" in appropriating that scene, though it's hardly newsworthy. Other photos of, say, quite accomplished musical performers on Grafton Street in Dublin -- well, I'm a "wee bit" less secure in my certainty that I'm out of firing range. Photos taken in the U.S. are even more closely scrutinized.
A fallible but practical "test" might be to ask oneself, if the lens were turned around, and without one's permission, his image were commercially exploited merely for another's personal gain, would one take moral if not legal offense.
It's the sort of dilemma that Calvin would see in black in white, and Hobbes would paint in rich ambiguity.