This week’s biggest infotainment news item, the Brangelina baby, may have legal ramifications for some bloggers. For unknown reasons, the news that the celebrity couple had a baby sparked a major media event. There was nothing noteworthy about the baby itself, other than that it had two Golden Globe nominees as parents.



The baby had such pre-natal buzz that People magazine cut a multimillion dollar deal to be the exclusive distributor of the official baby pictures in the U.S. It wasn’t long before starry-eyed bloggers got a hold of the photographs and plastered them across the blogosphere. Baby-crazy web surfers could save the $4 for the People magazine and just check out the baby pics for free at the LiveJournal gossip blog (http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt).





So, of course, legal action was threatened, this time by Hello! Magazine, the exclusive distributor of the baby photos in Europe. And, of course, this will only increase the profile of the blogs who posted the pictures.



The real victim in all this is Wilford Brimley, who sold the exclusive rights for the photos of his bunion removal surgery to Us Weekly, only to have the story dropped in favor of another Brangelina baby headline.