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June 8, 2006updated 22 Nov 2022 7:44pm

£5m cost of Jolie-Pitt baby pictures

By Press Gazette

The worldwide rights to the first official pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's daughter Shiloh are likely to set a new record for celebrity baby pictures, costing up to $10 million (£5.4 million).

Hello! and People magazine have won the UK and US bidding for undisclosed sums, reported to be worth $3.5 million (£1.9 million) and $4 million (£2.1 million) respectively. The proceeds will go to the couple's charities of choice, which have not been named, but are likely to be dedicated to children's welfare.

People reportedly offered $5 million for world rights, but didn't succeed and, according to the New York Post, only "barely nosed out" the American edition of Hello! and Us.

People is rushing out a special issue this week and upping its newsstand price 50 cents to $3.99, hoping to sell an extra million copies.

The US sale, according to the Post, involved a long weekend of negotiating after Getty Images photo agency, which took the pictures, summoned various picture editors to its New York offices.

One said: "We were sequestered in separate offices. The photos were shown to us around 10pm to midnight and then we had to submit bids by 6am Sunday morning. No-one got any sleep.

It was a manic game of phone tag."

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Hello!, which also won the Spanish rights to the pictures, pushed back its publication date from Tuesday to Thursday this week to include them and has, according to features editor Juliet Herd, instructed its lawyers to investigate "illegally obtained" copies of the pictures — which had leaked on to the internet before Thursday's release date — for "a clear abuse of copyright". Getty and Hello! said they would seek damages from websites that reproduce the picture.

The leaked photo first surfaced on US gossip blogs Oh No They Didn't and Defamer earlier this week.

Hello!'s Herd said: "It's a credit to the magazine that the couple choose us as the preferred vehicle for showing the first baby pictures. Obviously they recognised that we would do them justice and treat them with due respect."

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