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 three places: ticketing feeds published by the sellers themselves, freely licensed images from Wikimedia Commons, and images an editor has added by hand. We do not scrape image galleries, and we do not use images to illustrate anything other than the show they belong to.

We link rather than copy

Wherever possible we display an image directly from the rights holder's own website or CDN, which means we hold no copy of it. If they change or remove the image, it changes or disappears here too, which is the behaviour we want.

We only store 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, or explicit permission from the rights holder. Our editing tools record that basis against every stored image and refuse the upload without one.

Credit and attribution

Images under a Creative Commons licence are shown with the author, the licence, and a link back to the source, as those licences require. 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, and we will take it down. We aim to act within three working days.

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 are written for First Night rather than copied from press material. Most are drafted with the help of an AI model and then read, corrected and approved by an editor before they appear on the site, and some are written by hand. 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.