What is fanart.tv?

A difficult question to answer, but I’ll give it a shot. It’s an image archive. It’s a community. It’s a bandwidth gobbling monster. It’s a time sink. It’s a project of love. It’s a copyright nightmare. It’s all of these things and so much more.

An image archive

At it’s core, fanart.tv is an archive of high quality images. It’s a free resource anyone can use, comprising of images submitted by superfans. Images are uploaded for Movies, TV shows, Music artists and albums. Most images we store are promotional images; others are user generated. Above all they are of the highest possible quality.

A community

The site wouldn’t and couldn’t exist without its members. Whether submitting images or contributing their free time to moderate images, the community is the lifeblood of the site.

A bandwidth gobbling monster

When the site first started we had about 900 images. We catered for a single image type (ClearLogos), in a single section (TV shows). 7 years later and things have changed a lot. We now have multiple image types in multiple categories. That, however, is nothing in comparison to the increase in bandwidth. We process over 16 billion requests and over 200TB of bandwidth every month. Take a moment to let those numbers sink in.

A time sink

Building the site; creating images; moderating images. Hundreds of members of the community spend their free time doing these things. Due to the time consuming nature of all this, we go through moderators like Oreos. Burnout is a major issue with moderators and members alike. Fortunately finding new ones is dead eas… no wait, that sucks too!

A project of love

We wouldn’t contribute to the site if we didn’t love the media we create images for. It’s as simple as that.

A copyright nightmare

Copyright is what it is, love it or hate it you can’t avoid it. The site occupies a grey area. It’s not a comfortable place to live, but there isn’t much we can do about it.

We believe we have a decent case for fair use. The images we store are mostly promotional images. They are provided free of charge. They are visual representations of the product, not the product itself. They add value to the products by making fans collections look that much better. They are free promotion for the end products. They help generate additional hype for the end products. And finally they aren’t high enough resolution to substitute for a professional print.

A more recent addition is requiring copyright attribution information to added to some uploads.

All of these factors, while making good common sense, could, in the end, be meaningless. The general consensus seems to be what we do is fine, until it isn’t fine. At that point… who knows.

We have had amicable relations with the MPAA and other copyright organisations. We respond to all requests to take down images as soon as we can. If someone filed a lawsuit, however, we have no way of predicting how it would turn out.

As a website developer with a wife; two kids; and a mortgage, it’s a scary place to be.

That’s a lot of text, what’s the TLDR?

In short, we are a group of passionate fans. We work with each other to make our media collections something to be proud of. We don’t condone copyright infringement. We aren’t piracy apologists.

While individual members may not like copyright (the abuse of copyright laws in particular); as a group we love what members of the copyright industry produce and will continue to support them in any way we can.