it is legal to take candid photos of celebrities when they're in a public venue. there can be no contesting that you have the right to whip it out and snap a picture of any man, woman or child you like, so long as they're out on the town and not in their backyard; i certainly can't stop you.
it doesn't mean you have intelligence, luck, respect or class.
case in point.it most certainly does not mean that you are the celeb's bff - in fact, given that the folks in the relevant parts of our fannish population do not sell their pictures and also claim to be FANS, they would be what is known (in the parlance of our times) as a
groupie.
that said, it does mean they paid the cover charge. it probably means they're buying drinks and food from the establishment. and given that they're being groupies for musicians that could really use a broader (no pun intended) fanbase, i imagine that the benefits of having asses in seats outweighs the more annoying parts (blinded by flash, rudeness, inability to hold an uninterrupted conversation for ten minutes) for the gents in question.
i wish that they didn't think of us as
fandom: a necessary evil. but as i said above, groupies have every right to be groupies, even if it does mean that the rest of the world thinks of us fannish types as the kind of people that... well, you've seen
lj_biz.
eta: it seems the OP has deleted the post that was linked above - in short, a girl went to steve carlson's birthday party at l'scorpion in los angeles, took a bunch of pictures of steve, jason manns and jensen, and
posted them all over the place. some folks on
steve_carlson turned up their nose at the paparazzi style - too close, too much flash in a dark environment, she followed them out into the street and kept on - and she lost it on them.
fuck off, go to hell, that kind of thing. the party continues
on her journal.
eta II: one link down.