If it’s a fan site Most Celeb agents etc are happy for you to use there press release pack photo’s just a quick email and your away but if you have any sort of revenue-generating stuff on there adsence, ask for donations to running cost etc then they will expect to be payed …?
If you take a photo, you own that photo and may use it as you wish. If you took photos of celebrities in public, then you absolutely have the right to use those photos.
If you don’t wish to pay then try getting fans to send in photos of themselves with the celeb remember to get a photographer or owner of the image too sign a release form or starting as affiliate and run gallery pages for some market leaders...
This company used to be quite cheap for images
PR Photos - Exclusive Celebrity Stock Photos For The Press!
Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States has some useful info on copyright
Also google Public Domain photos of the celeb in question
Or if you wanted to take pictures of your or someone else standing next to someone famous and you uk based then
http://www.madametussauds.com/London/ ……? You can use pics you take yourself
If your site was a search engine you can Use thumbnails
“In 2002 the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that search engines could display thumbnails of images”
A grey area is also
cached copies of web pages displayed on your search engine/web site
Cached copies of pages Take google wayback etc these after all copy the whole page with all the text included. It also includes links to the original graphics of the relevant page, so what you see is a genuine copy of the page as it was the last time Google visited it. It is possible to imagine people surfing this cached version of the site, instead of the original….