WHEN is a Hollywood celebrity big enough to require special legal protection not available to little people?

That is the question facing the city of Los Angeles, whose officials are debating the implementation of a 20-yard “personal safety bubble”, to be created around celebrities deemed “paparazzi targets” when moving around the city.

The initiative was proposed last week by Dennis Zine, an influential politician, in the wake of the latest Britney Spears psychiatric emergency, when her ambulance was surrounded by police cars and helicopters to shield her from a crowd of 60 photographers.

Last week’s chase brought new tension in the already fraught relationship between Hollywood performers, paparazzi and police, who claim no new laws are needed yet seem unable to protect stars such as Spears from photographers - or themselves.

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The city council will debate whether stars should be “licensed” for protection by City Hall, a permit that could eclipse court-mandated ankle bracelets - equipped with a global positioning system transmitter - as status symbols.

“The Britney Spears case, with police cars and helicopters all becoming involved, was insane. Such clashes have become a hazard to both celebrities and ordinary people,” Zine said last week.

The so-called Britney law would be the world’s toughest antipaparazzi statute, seeking to confiscate all profits from a photograph taken without signed consent within the “bubble of safety” around a star. This would create problems: many celebrities pretend to be ambushed at nightclubs by photographers, who have in fact been tipped off by their press agents. It could also make Los Angeles a haven for scandal-ridden politicians and criminals.

Los Angeles is experiencing a paparazzi gold rush. With the boom in internet gossip sites, tabloid television and a host of star-oriented magazines over the past five years, the number of freelance photographers has risen from a few dozen to hundreds. Many are young Britons working on tourist visas who claim they are Spears’s last remaining friends.

Despite interest in the first baby shots from Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the one consistent breadwinner for the motorbike-riding photographers has been Spears. She accounts for a third of the business of one leading agency, X17. Another, British-owned agency, Splash News, earned £100,000 for one snap of her in a hot tub.

Spears moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles in 1998 to shoot the video for her first pop single, Baby One More Time, in Venice high school, west Los Angeles, because the school had been used 20 years earlier as the location for John Travolta’s hit film Grease. Since then she has nurtured a symbiotic relationship with her rolling court of photographers.

Sometimes she asks them to guide her home after a night on the town; on other occasions she accidentally drives over them, giving rise to frequent reports that she suffers from a bipolar disorder exacerbated by the stress of her legal battle with her former husband Kevin Federline over custody of their two children.

Last week, when the 26-year-old pop singer was released early from the psychiatric unit of a local hospital, instead of going home to her new £3m beachside mansion, she cruised slowly in her distinctive Mercedes until she attracted a tail of paparazzi and then led them across the sprawling city.

Zine, the Los Angeles councillor, said he did not want to damage the “Britney economy”, which according to Portfolio magazine generates $120m (£60m) a year for American photographers, lawyers, magazines, websites and television programmes.

“This is nine years after her first hit single, an extraordinary performance for a bubblegum pop star.

“She has earned $125m for herself, but she is also a money-minting machine for hundreds of people in the US media,” said Duff McDonald, a writer for Portfolio.

The American media have qualms about exploiting the unhappy star, but the money is too good. “We would like to pull away from her - we do not want to be responsible for a Diana-like tragedy - but every time we put her on the cover our sales leap,” said one magazine editor.

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