Perhaps most of us will never enjoy our 15 minutes of fame but an enterprising entrepreneur from Down Under is offering all of us the opportunity to become voyeurs to the stars.

Anyone with a mobile phone camera can now sign on to become a paparazzi with Darryn Lyons’ Big Pictures photo agency.

Lyons is getting in on the user-generated content boom by launching a service that enables any budding “citizen journalist” to upload and sell celebrity shots they’ve taken, directly from their mobile phones.

The new service is a mobile version of his website, MrPaparazzi.com, which he launched 18 months ago, combining celebrity news, photos and videos in a Perez Hilton-style blog.

It allows users to upload celebrity photos that, once approved, can be sold on by Big Pictures. Lyons’ agency has previously sold images sent in of Cameron Diaz surfing, which made $32,000, and pictures of Amy Winehouse sold for $1,000. Contributors earn around 50 per cent of the licence fees Big Pictures gets from selling images sent in via the website.

Lyons rode the wave of celebrity culture to the top in the past 15 years — indeed, one might say he’s become a celebrity himself, and his income probably dwarfs that of some of the celebrities he relentlessly pursues.

Society eats it up — his website attracts some 1.7 million unique visitors a week. And he claims that the celebrities themselves often collude with him, as he says a large number of tip-offs come from the stars, some of whom even sign contracts with Big Pictures to set up photo shoots which look “snatched.”

As he charmingly put it in a recent interview with The Guardian, in which he speaks of himself in both the first and third person: “Darryn Lyons has made a lot of people famous with his pictures, without question. I get quite excited about making something from nothing. My whole life has been about making something from nothing. We live in a society where most people today have two major things on their agenda, backed up by survey after survey. They either want to be rich, or they want to be famous. Darryn Lyons would be happy to facilitate that service.”

There is a downside to the easy money though.

Celebrities such as Björk have been known to physically assault paparazzi she’s accused of stalking her, or of getting too close to her young child. (Although, considering that an overwrought fan once tried to kill her with a letter bomb before committing suicide himself, one can understand why Björk might over-react on occasion. After all, Mark David Chapman was clutching a Beatles album when he pumped those fatal bullets into John Lennon in 1980.)

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling is currently suing Lyons for photographing her son in public, in what could turn out to be a landmark privacy case.

And Lyons’ agency was recently fined $1.2 million for photographing Liz Hurley at a private beach resort.

But once you’re at the top of the paparazzi game, these are minor setbacks and the cost of doing business is just chump change.

Because in the end there will never cease to be a demand for photos of otherwise ordinary people who are so wrapped up in their own celebrity egos that they’re willing to perform humiliating stunts just to make a headline or a blog somewhere. Think Britney Spears here.

Or, for that matter, demand continues unabated for photos of celebrities acting like ordinary human beings, say, pushing a baby buggy, or sitting at a cafe, or walking out of a rehab clinic. Think Mel Gibson here.

Along the way we’ve cultivated a generation of kids who no longer aspire to be astronauts or dinosaur bones diggers, or a journeyman plumber for that matter.

They want to become like Paris Hilton — a person who is “famous” only for being “famous.”

And now Darryn Lyons can make all those dreams come true for every one of us.