How to avoid copyright infringement with celebrity pictures?

Hi guys. How come some entertainment blogs, like celebrity gossip, etc, use images of celebrities in their articles without copyright infringement? I know a couple of smaller blogs that post news/viral content and they all have pictures of celebrities, and they've been running ads via AdSense for months or even years.

Some articles have 10+ pictures in them, and paying for licensed pictures would cost $1000+ and I'm sure they don't do that.

Also, the images they use are not Royalty free, I checked.

What am I missing? I'm kind of new to blogging and black hat in general.

Thanks.

Have you considered changing the footprint of the image and just outright posting it? Maybe that's how they avoid copyright claims, since most of the claims are machine generated, I don't think human resources are being used by adsense when smaller blogs are concerned.

Some of the said blogs are relatively small, compared to big corporations. But they have tens of thousands of articles and all of them have images of celebrities. AdSense must've seen them. I encountered such websites by the hundreds.

snowwh1te said:

Some of the said blogs are relatively small, compared to big corporations. But they have tens of thousands of articles and all of them have images of celebrities. AdSense must've seen them. I encountered such websites by the hundreds.

Click to expand...

What I'm saying is, they probably resize the images and change footprints and when a human comes along, he's not going to compare hundreds of images with the OG source. I think AI or a tool is used to determine whether two images match.