Image rights and takedowns

Where show images come from

First Night is a diary for theatregoers. Posters and production images appear alongside each show so you can recognise what you logged. They come from a few places: ticketing feeds published by the sellers themselves, freely licensed images from Wikimedia Commons, images an editor has added by hand, and images members have suggested that an editor has approved. We do not scrape image galleries, and we do not use images to illustrate anything other than the show they belong to.

Where possible, we use the source image

Wherever possible we display an image from its source website or CDN rather than keeping our own copy. To show it at the right size, our website host may keep a temporary cached copy for a few weeks. If the source changes or removes the image, it changes or disappears here too once that cache expires, which is the behaviour we want.

We only keep a copy of an image on our own servers where we have a basis to do so: a free licence such as Creative Commons, a work in the public domain, permission from the rights holder, or an image First Night made itself. That basis is recorded with every copy we keep, and our tools will not store a copy without one. When we stop using a copy, we delete it.

First Night editions

Some shows carry a First Night edition rather than a production poster. It is an image we designed ourselves: a simple title card, or our own typography set over artwork that is in the public domain or released for reuse, such as a painting a museum has made free to use. A First Night edition is ours, not the production's, and we always label it as one, never as an official poster. Its credit names each artwork it uses, who holds it, and the terms it is used on.

Credit and attribution

Where an image's licence requires attribution, such as a Creative Commons licence, the show's page credits it beside the image and when it is enlarged: the author where known, the licence, and a link back to the source. Our tools will not add a Creative Commons image without that credit. If you spot a credit that is missing or wrong, please tell us and we will correct it.

Asking us to remove an image

If you hold the rights to an image on First Night and would rather it was not here, you do not need to send a legal notice. Email hello@firstnight.io with the link to the page and which image you mean. We'll review the request promptly and aim to remove the image within seven working days of receiving a clear removal request.

It helps if you can tell us who you are and what your relationship to the image is, but we will not hold up a removal while we work that out. If you would prefer we keep using the image with a credit or a link to your site, we are glad to do that instead. Just say so.

Other content

Show titles, dates, venues and cast are factual catalogue information. Show descriptions on First Night are written for First Night, drafted with the help of an AI model or by hand, and reviewed before they appear. We don't republish synopses from other sites: text we gather from sources such as Wikipedia or ticketing feeds is used only as research, and a show without a reviewed description simply doesn't have one yet. Notes and ratings belong to the members who wrote them, as set out in our Terms of Service. If you believe any of it infringes your rights, the same address reaches us: hello@firstnight.io.

Corrections

We would rather get this right than be asked to. If a show on First Night has the wrong poster, a poster for a different production, or an image you supplied for a run that has since closed, let us know and we will fix it.