Corbis Corp has acquired Outline Press, a celebrity photograph archive company, for an undisclosed sum. Outline, based in Los Angeles, California, has 50 staff and supplies celebrity portraits to magazines such as Details, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Newsweek and Time. Seattle, Washington-based Corbis is the photo archive company owned by Microsoft Corp’s Bill Gates. This is its third acquisition of photographic archives this year. The company currently owns the rights to some 23m pictures, and has put 1.3m of them online, which are available online through the company’s web site and Corbis View search engine. Outline’s collection includes studio portraits of film and television stars, sports figures, musicians, dancers – and CEOs, so no doubt Gates has bought some pictures of himself along with the rest, and maybe some of his arch rivals.
