Copyright and takedown

The short version

• Playbills are somebody else's copyrighted work. Thespiary does not own them and does not claim to.
• A scan you upload stays private to your account. We use it to read out the facts of a performance.
• Those facts — who performed, in what, where, and when — are what the public archive is made of.
• If you hold rights in a playbill and want it taken down, email copyright@thespiary.com and we will act on it.

What you may upload

You may upload playbills, programmes, cast-change slips, lobby signs, and similar production material that you hold a copy of. You do not have to have attended the performance yourself.

Please do not upload:

• material you obtained unlawfully;
• material you have been told, by a rights holder or a court, not to share;
• material that has already been removed from Thespiary following a takedown request.

Uploading something does not transfer any rights in it to us, and it does not give you rights you did not already have. You keep whatever rights you had; the publisher keeps theirs.

What happens to a scan you upload

• It is stored privately and served only to you. It is not shown to other users.
• It is processed to extract the factual credits printed in it. The raw text output of that processing is also private.
• It is not included in Thespiary's public data dumps, which contain extracted data only and never source images.
• It is deleted when you delete it, from "My uploads" on the upload page, and when you delete your account. Either way the image and the text extracted from it go for good. Credits already submitted from it stay in the shared archive as community data, without naming the scan.

We may in future display low-resolution cover images publicly, so that a production page can show what its programme looked like. We have not done this yet. If we decide to, we will update this policy and say so before any image becomes public.

What we publish, and under what licence

The public archive contains facts: names, roles, venues, dates. Facts are not owned by anyone and are not what a playbill's copyright protects. Those facts, together with the rest of the community-built database, are published under CC BY-SA 4.0.

That licence covers the data only. It does not cover, and we do not purport to license to anyone, the playbill scans themselves or the artwork, photographs, and text printed in them. Those remain the property of whoever owns them. We are not in a position to grant rights in someone else's work, so we don't.

Requesting a takedown

If you hold rights in material on Thespiary, or act for someone who does, email copyright@thespiary.com. Please include:

• what the work is;
• where it is on Thespiary — a link, or enough detail for us to find it;
• who you are, how to reach you, and the basis on which you hold or represent the rights;
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised;
• a statement that the information you have given is accurate.

We will acknowledge your request, and remove or disable access to the material while we look at it rather than after. We will tell the person who uploaded it what was removed and why. Every removal is recorded in our moderation audit trail.

If you are the uploader and you believe material was removed in error, reply to the notice we send you and tell us why. If the objection is resolved, we will restore the material.

Accounts that repeatedly upload infringing material may be restricted or closed.

This is a good-faith process that we operate because we think it is the right way to run an archive. It is not a claim to any statutory safe harbour, and it does not limit any rights you have.

Getting in touch

Copyright and takedown: copyright@thespiary.com. Thespiary is operated by an individual; a postal address is available on request to a rights holder who needs one.