Photo Policy

401DutchOperas is a non-profit volunteer website that highlights forgotten Dutch opera composers and their operas from the past and present. The portraits of post-war composers were created in collaboration with the composers themselves, their relatives, and opera companies. Organizations such as the Dutch National Opera, the Concertgebouw, Royal Collections, Opera Spanga, Lyrica Ghent, the composers themselves, or their descendants have provided visual material for this purpose. We use this material in good faith. The biographies on this website serve solely to promote the composers and their work. No commercial interest is served by them. Therefore, the visual material used here falls under the globally accepted 'fair use' principle, the compass that also guides Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Recently, aggressive copyright groups have become active, laying bizarre claims on postage-stamp-sized photos, which they 'track down' using obscure dragnet techniques. For us, it's very simple: if a photographer or a relative finds/thinks that we can't use photo X or Y, we will remove the photo immediately and without discussion. This aggression is not without consequences: we have currently removed dozens of biographies of better known post-war Dutch opera composers as a precaution, ranging from Louis Andriessen to Hans Kox & co. Over time we may reinstall them, using only our own fhotos (we interviewd them ourselves), Wikimedia Commons images, or otherwise cleared images. To be clear: the pictures used in the past were given to us by these composers, but since they are no longer around, there's no way for us to prove use with consent. And then again, we're not doing this for ourselves. Its bizarre that we have to deal with such agression within a crystal clear 'fair use' environment. Oh... the accompanying illustration is our own creation.