How to find reusable media

[piccolomondo]

Thanks to organizations like Creative Commons, licenses like the GNU Free Documentation License, and the public domain, you can find all sorts of legally-republishable contents on the web for use on your site/ blog or multimedia presentation - tons of photos, songs, movies, documents and books - freely available for you to download and republish without fear of the copyright police.
Check out:

1. Project Gutenberg
A library of 20,000 free ebooks whose copyright has expired in the USA Book listings.


2. Creative Commons
A non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright.

Creative Commons' recently released tabbed search interface looks up CC-licensed photos from Flickr, any file type on Yahoo! and Google, videos on Blip.TV and music from OWL.
(Check exactly which CC license the media carries - whether or not it can be modified, used for commercial purposes, or should include attribution.)

See also:
Flickr Creative Commons pool.
Flickr: Creative Commons


3 . Wikimedia Commons
A user-edited repository of nearly 700,000 pieces of freely available, modifiable (even for commercial purposes) media that's categorized and tagged by users.
Need a photo of the moon? Type Category:Moon into the Wikimedia search box.

See also:
Wikipedia:Public domain image resources


4. CCHits and CCMixter
Social web app, digg-style directory of CC-licensed songs, podcasts, remixes.


5. EveryStockPhoto
ESP aggregates photos licensed for reuse from several free stock photo sources.
Other free stock photo sites for either corporate or public use:

• FreePhotosBank
• stock.xchng
• MorgueFile
• FreeFoto.com
• StockVault.net
• Flickr Stock repository group

6. Yahoo! Creative Commons search,
but no public domain option.


7. Google advanced search option.


Or use Google hacks; for instance, to find CC-licensed Excel documents with the words 'time map' in them, try:

filetype:xls time map "this work is licensed under a Creative Commons"

Similarly, to find PDF's licensed under the GNU FDL, try:

filetype:pdf "published under the GNU Free Documentation License"

8. Public domain
Web site Public Domain Torrents offers classic and B movie downloads via BitTorrent for free.

A good place for those people not yet on the bit torrent bandwagon,
Archive's Moving Images Collection of movies, films, and videos.


Archive's collection of audio recordings. This collection ranges from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry recordings, to original music contributed by users.

[piccolomondo]

Another collection of high-quality books that you can download legally thanks to Lessig's (*) Creative Commons . A good mix of genres and on the "how-to" side of things,

55 Ways to Have Fun With Google.

Not a bad collection of works, and certainly worth the price.

Most of these books are issued in traditional print ($$$) and free download versions, which raises the obvious question: does this make any business sense for publishers, let alone authors?
Lawrence Lessig (*), who initiated the concept, asserts that it does, noting that more readers who access the free download copy will ultimately buy the print version than those who don't. Or, put more simply: the converts will exceed cannibals, which results in a win-win-win-win situation. The readers win one way or another; the authors and publishers win; society wins; and so does the free flow of information. What more can you want?

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(*) Lawrence Lessig is currently professor of law at Stanford Law SchoolCenter for Internet and Society. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications...

He proposed the concept of "Free Culture". He also supports free software and open spectrum. He is founder and CEO of the Creative Commons and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At his "Free culture" keynote at OSCON 2002, half of his speech was also about software patents, which he views as a rising threat to both free/open source software and innovation... [wiki]

The free audio and text versions of Lawrence's Lessig's book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.