Your script and your licence
You bring the script. It never leaves.
This page exists because a committee will ask, and because the answer is short. The Half Call is your company’s internal workspace — the same job as the stage manager’s ring binder and the noticeboard in the rehearsal room, which no licensor has ever objected to.
Your group has licensed a play and bought its copies. The Half Call is where you organise the work of staging it. We are not a publisher, we do not sell you a script, and we do not hold a catalogue you could choose from. There is nothing here to browse.
What we will never build
These are settled decisions rather than current limitations. They will not quietly become features later.
No export, no download
Nothing lets a licensed script or a set of sides leave the workspace as a file. Printing goes through the app, and what comes out carries your licence reference and the actor’s name.
No public links
Nothing about a production is reachable by anyone who is not a member of that company. There is no shareable view, no preview link and no page a search engine can reach.
No library of scripts
We never hold a catalogue. Your group brings its own script, and the only plays in The Half Call are the ones companies have put there themselves.
No streaming or recording
The Half Call has nothing to do with performance rights beyond recording which licence you hold. It will not capture, host or stream a performance.
Some licensors permit copies. Some do not. That decides one feature.
A performance licence is not a copying licence, and the two come apart in exactly one place: sides. Splitting a play into per-actor extracts means reproducing the text, and whether your group may do that is the licensor’s decision and not ours.
So The Half Call is designed to gate on it. Where your licensor sells a copying or digital permission, sides and line learning are available. Where it does not, they stay switched off and everything else still works — the scheduler, the availability grid, the call sheets, the off-book tracking, the prop and costume budget, the whole of the coordination half of the product. That is most of why anybody renews.
We ask for the licensor and your licence reference when the script goes in, we record it against the production, and we print it on what comes out. We do not ring your licensor and nobody here reads your licence. Checking up on you is not our job, and pretending to would protect nobody.
And when the production closes
Access to the script ends with the production, because that is how the licence works. The production is archived, the members can no longer open the text, and nothing about it becomes available to anyone else — ever, at any price.
The copyright notice, the author’s attribution and the licensor’s imprint are carried through everything The Half Call does with a script, and printed on every side and every screen that shows the text. Stripping them is its own kind of wrong and we do not do it.
If a rights holder believes something here should not be, there is a person to write to and a process that answers — start here. We would rather hear from a licensor early and be boring than be interesting to their lawyers later.
Why we are this careful about somebody else’s risk
Because your group cannot insure it. A standard amateur-theatre policy covers injury and physical damage; a copyright claim is not in the insuring clause, and holding the correct authorisation is usually a condition of the cancellation cover — so a letter that pulls your run destroys the cover at the same moment it creates the loss. The bill would land on unpaid volunteers personally.
That is a better reason to behave well than any commercial one, and it is why the containment above is in the design rather than in the terms.
The rest of the questions a committee asks are on the page written for them.