A client once sent over the exact headshot from the company's press kit, the same image on his LinkedIn profile and the firm's "About" page, and asked us to drop it into the infobox of his draft biography. It read like the obvious asset: high resolution, well lit, and clearly his to use.
It was his to use, but not in the way the encyclopedia requires. The photographer usually holds the copyright, not the subject, and permission to run an image on a website or in a press kit is not the same as releasing it under a free license anyone can reuse. Most submitted portraits fail on that point alone.
Even a portrait with cleared rights often cannot go up as "fair use." For anyone still living, the rule treats a new photograph as something that could, in principle, always be taken. A copyrighted image is judged replaceable by definition, whether or not anyone has actually gone and taken the replacement.
Non-free content is not used when a freely licensed file that serves the same encyclopedic purpose could reasonably be expected to be created — as is nearly always true of a portrait of a living person.
This surprises people because it inverts the usual expectation. A magazine can license a portrait for exclusive use and run it for years. The encyclopedia cannot, even with the subject's written permission for one-time use, because "you may publish this" is not the same commitment as "anyone may reuse, adapt, or sell this, forever." The threshold is release, not access.
The fix is rarely a legal workaround. It is a new photograph, taken and released properly: the subject or a hired photographer uploads it under a compatible free license, or an existing image someone already released that way gets used instead, a conference organizer's archive, a government agency's collection, a colleague's donated shot. None of that resembles the polished press-kit portrait we started with.
It is an odd thing to explain to a communications team used to controlling every image that reaches print. What we tell them is that the encyclopedia is not asking for access to a photograph. It is asking for the right to keep it, unconditionally, without asking again.
