It depends on where you live as the laws are different in different countries. In the US, generally, the answer is no, you don't need a model release if the pictures were taken at a public event where there is no expectation of privacey. If the event is a private one, then that's a different story. Of course keep in mind, I'm not a lawyer, although I have talked to a couple a time or two and I've taken some 40 or 50k event shots over the years that most of them went up on my web site for people to view, buy, comment on, or in a few really lucky cases (for me, not them) steal and use commercially. I've made more off of those cases than just about everything else I've sold all together. :D I do have my images registered though, which gives a lot of power behind the automatic copyright our images have here in the US. And no matter what you think about the images you take... if you are in the US, register every one of them. It's one fee for as many slightly larger than thumbnail sized you can get on a CD or DVD and you just never know who is going to take a liking to one of your shots and think they can use it for anything they want.
Also, even if you are totally legal, there is nothing stopping someone that has more money than sense, from thinking you have infringed on their privacy and sue you. You have to also be a bit more aware of where you are shooting if there are children involved. In the 10 years or so I did event photography, I have had a number of people and parents ask me why I'm taking the pictures and what I was going to do with them. I've only had a couple that asked me not to post their images on the web. I'm always careful to try to find any images of them while they were with me so I could either mark down their number or delete them on the spot. I might feel different one of them happened to be that one in a million shot, but I figure the chances of that are pretty slim, so I always comply with the request.
One thing you will find out if you take a lot of shots. They do start eating up web disk space really fast. I forget how many gigs of images I had on my web site before I stopped doing the events and started deleting a lot of the images off my site.
If you are not in the US, it might be totally different for you.
Mike
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