To the People Who Steal Images From My Website
James Cowman
There is something I have wanted to say for a long time to the people who come to my website specifically to take images and repost them somewhere else. I am going to say it plainly: fuck you. I realize that is not particularly polite, but after watching this happen repeatedly, I am no longer interested in pretending that I consider the practice harmless.
To be clear, I am not claiming that every photograph of Farrah Fawcett belongs to me simply because it appears on my website. Most of the historical photographs I discuss were created decades ago by photographers, studios, publications, or other copyright holders. However, that does not mean the particular material I have spent years locating, purchasing, scanning, researching, restoring, and presenting should automatically become somebody else’s source material simply because I made it visible online.
There is a considerable difference between seeing the same photograph somewhere else and taking the exact image I have provided. If I purchase an original magazine, photograph, negative, transparency, or other piece of archival material and create a high-quality scan, the person who later saves that scan from my website did not independently locate the same source. They came here because I had already done the work. That seems obvious to me, yet it is repeatedly ignored.
Some of the material in my collection has taken years to locate. I have spent money on photographs, magazines, books, negatives, transparencies, and other archival sources because I take research seriously and because I want to understand where these images came from. In many cases, locating the material is only the beginning. An image may need to be scanned, cleaned, identified, dated, compared with other photographs, or placed within the proper historical context before I ever use it on the website.
Unfortunately, once that image appears online, all of that work becomes invisible to some people. They save the image, repost it on Facebook, Instagram, another website, or wherever else they want, and the original source disappears. Sometimes the image is cropped. Sometimes it is altered. Sometimes it is run through AI, colorized, sharpened, animated, or otherwise changed before being circulated again.
This is one reason I have become increasingly concerned about the way historical photographs move around the internet. After an image has been copied enough times, it becomes almost impossible to determine where a particular version originated. The original scan may be separated from the publication, photograph, negative, or transparency it came from, and whatever research accompanied it is usually lost along the way. Eventually someone posts it with no idea where it came from, and another person takes it from them.
I have heard the usual arguments used to defend this behavior. The photograph was already on the internet. Nobody is making money from it. It is only being shared among fans. It is a tribute. These explanations may make the person doing it feel better, but they don't address the actual issue.
The fact that something is available to view online does not mean that everyone who sees it has automatically been invited to redistribute it. If that were true, there would be very little reason for anyone to invest time or money in building an archive and making portions of it available publicly. Access to something does not eliminate the work that went into providing that access.
The word “tribute” does not change this either. I have become increasingly skeptical of the way that word is used in fandom because it can apparently justify almost anything. A photograph can be taken without permission, altered beyond recognition, converted into an AI image, animated into something that never happened, or reposted without identifying its source, and somehow calling the result a tribute is supposed to end the discussion. In my view, it does not.
If someone genuinely respects historical material, provenance should matter. Where did the photograph come from? Who took it? When was it created? Where was it originally published? Has the image been altered? These are basic questions when working with archival material, yet they disappear very quickly when the objective is to obtain another image to post.
What bothers me most is that the people taking these images usually know exactly where they found them. You came to my website. You saw something you wanted. You considered it valuable enough to save and use elsewhere, yet apparently not valuable enough to acknowledge where you obtained it or to consider whether you should take it in the first place.
That contradiction is difficult for me to overlook. If my material is useful enough that you repeatedly visit the website looking for images, then the work being done here clearly has value to you. However, valuing the result while disregarding the work behind it is not respect. It is simply taking advantage of somebody else’s effort.
There is also a simple alternative for anyone who wants to build a collection of Farrah material: do the research yourself. Buy the magazines. Find the photographs. Search auction listings. Locate original publications. Purchase negatives and transparencies. Scan your own material and take the time to identify it. That is exactly what I have done, and nothing prevents someone else from doing the same.
In fact, I encourage people who are genuinely interested in Farrah to build their own collections and conduct their own research. Independent research can turn up material that I have never seen and can add something useful to the historical record. What does not add anything is simply moving the same images from my website to another page and presenting them to a different audience.
I also understand that once anything is placed online, there is no practical way to control every person who saves it. I am not naive about how the internet works. However, the fact that something is easy to do does not make the practice reasonable, and it certainly does not require me to pretend that I am comfortable with it.
For this reason, I have become far more cautious about the images I make available publicly. That is unfortunate because I would much rather use historical material to support the research and essays on this website. However, every time somebody treats the site as a free image archive, it gives me another reason not to make rare or high-quality material available at all.
So if you come to this website because you are interested in the research, the history, or the essays, you are welcome here. If you come here because you are looking through the pages for images you can save, alter, repost, or use as material for your own social media page, I would prefer that you didn’t.
And since I began this essay by saying exactly what I wanted to say, I might as well end it the same way. If you are one of the people who repeatedly come here to steal images because you do not want to find your own material, do your own research, or build your own collection, then fuck you. Find your own images.
James Cowman
There is something I have wanted to say for a long time to the people who come to my website specifically to take images and repost them somewhere else. I am going to say it plainly: fuck you. I realize that is not particularly polite, but after watching this happen repeatedly, I am no longer interested in pretending that I consider the practice harmless.
To be clear, I am not claiming that every photograph of Farrah Fawcett belongs to me simply because it appears on my website. Most of the historical photographs I discuss were created decades ago by photographers, studios, publications, or other copyright holders. However, that does not mean the particular material I have spent years locating, purchasing, scanning, researching, restoring, and presenting should automatically become somebody else’s source material simply because I made it visible online.
There is a considerable difference between seeing the same photograph somewhere else and taking the exact image I have provided. If I purchase an original magazine, photograph, negative, transparency, or other piece of archival material and create a high-quality scan, the person who later saves that scan from my website did not independently locate the same source. They came here because I had already done the work. That seems obvious to me, yet it is repeatedly ignored.
Some of the material in my collection has taken years to locate. I have spent money on photographs, magazines, books, negatives, transparencies, and other archival sources because I take research seriously and because I want to understand where these images came from. In many cases, locating the material is only the beginning. An image may need to be scanned, cleaned, identified, dated, compared with other photographs, or placed within the proper historical context before I ever use it on the website.
Unfortunately, once that image appears online, all of that work becomes invisible to some people. They save the image, repost it on Facebook, Instagram, another website, or wherever else they want, and the original source disappears. Sometimes the image is cropped. Sometimes it is altered. Sometimes it is run through AI, colorized, sharpened, animated, or otherwise changed before being circulated again.
This is one reason I have become increasingly concerned about the way historical photographs move around the internet. After an image has been copied enough times, it becomes almost impossible to determine where a particular version originated. The original scan may be separated from the publication, photograph, negative, or transparency it came from, and whatever research accompanied it is usually lost along the way. Eventually someone posts it with no idea where it came from, and another person takes it from them.
I have heard the usual arguments used to defend this behavior. The photograph was already on the internet. Nobody is making money from it. It is only being shared among fans. It is a tribute. These explanations may make the person doing it feel better, but they don't address the actual issue.
The fact that something is available to view online does not mean that everyone who sees it has automatically been invited to redistribute it. If that were true, there would be very little reason for anyone to invest time or money in building an archive and making portions of it available publicly. Access to something does not eliminate the work that went into providing that access.
The word “tribute” does not change this either. I have become increasingly skeptical of the way that word is used in fandom because it can apparently justify almost anything. A photograph can be taken without permission, altered beyond recognition, converted into an AI image, animated into something that never happened, or reposted without identifying its source, and somehow calling the result a tribute is supposed to end the discussion. In my view, it does not.
If someone genuinely respects historical material, provenance should matter. Where did the photograph come from? Who took it? When was it created? Where was it originally published? Has the image been altered? These are basic questions when working with archival material, yet they disappear very quickly when the objective is to obtain another image to post.
What bothers me most is that the people taking these images usually know exactly where they found them. You came to my website. You saw something you wanted. You considered it valuable enough to save and use elsewhere, yet apparently not valuable enough to acknowledge where you obtained it or to consider whether you should take it in the first place.
That contradiction is difficult for me to overlook. If my material is useful enough that you repeatedly visit the website looking for images, then the work being done here clearly has value to you. However, valuing the result while disregarding the work behind it is not respect. It is simply taking advantage of somebody else’s effort.
There is also a simple alternative for anyone who wants to build a collection of Farrah material: do the research yourself. Buy the magazines. Find the photographs. Search auction listings. Locate original publications. Purchase negatives and transparencies. Scan your own material and take the time to identify it. That is exactly what I have done, and nothing prevents someone else from doing the same.
In fact, I encourage people who are genuinely interested in Farrah to build their own collections and conduct their own research. Independent research can turn up material that I have never seen and can add something useful to the historical record. What does not add anything is simply moving the same images from my website to another page and presenting them to a different audience.
I also understand that once anything is placed online, there is no practical way to control every person who saves it. I am not naive about how the internet works. However, the fact that something is easy to do does not make the practice reasonable, and it certainly does not require me to pretend that I am comfortable with it.
For this reason, I have become far more cautious about the images I make available publicly. That is unfortunate because I would much rather use historical material to support the research and essays on this website. However, every time somebody treats the site as a free image archive, it gives me another reason not to make rare or high-quality material available at all.
So if you come to this website because you are interested in the research, the history, or the essays, you are welcome here. If you come here because you are looking through the pages for images you can save, alter, repost, or use as material for your own social media page, I would prefer that you didn’t.
And since I began this essay by saying exactly what I wanted to say, I might as well end it the same way. If you are one of the people who repeatedly come here to steal images because you do not want to find your own material, do your own research, or build your own collection, then fuck you. Find your own images.
