Public Domain Content

Public Domain Audio Books from LibriVox

2009-05-24T22:20:00.001-07:00

Librivox offers free audiobook versions of books available in the public domain. The readers can’t be compared to Audible readers but you can’t complain about the price. Opening their library index you can see an impressive 1991 audiobooks available for download. Audiobook formats are in mp3 (64 kbs and 128 kbs) and ogg audio files.

link: Librivox

Public Domain Sheet Music

2009-01-13T01:01:00.000-08:00

We're getting a lot request for some sheet music. Just in case you're wondering what are sheet music, Wikipedia define them as a written or printed form of musical notation; like its analogs -- books, pamphlets, etc.

MusOpen

MusOpen is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. We want to give the world access to music without the legal hassles so common today. There is a great deal of music that has expired copyrights, but almost no recordings of this music is in the public domain. We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.

Link : MusOpen

Mutopia

It offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download. These are based on editions in the public domain, and include works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and many others. Also host a growing number of modern editions, arrangements and new music.

Link: The Mutopia Project

A Free Book on Public Domain

2008-12-12T01:33:00.000-08:00

I love the fact the author James Boyle decided to give away his his book online. If you believe in the idea of free information that you should practice it. He certainly lives up to his reputation.

The book it selves gives you a better understanding on the war of information and the hypocrisy of copyright laws. Its a good read, and worth having in your PC, Iphone, Sony Reader or whatever you use to read PDF Books.

download link: The Public Domain

Free Movies You Can Post in Your Site

2007-03-21T20:38:00.000-07:00

The Internet Archive moving images collection contains an archive of movies, films, and videos. This collection contains thousands of videos which range from classic full-length movies, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to user-uploaded videos of every genre. This is great content available for free which you can post in your site or blog to drive in tons of visitors.

Internet Movie Archive: Link

Free Public Domain Music

2006-11-29T22:47:00.000-08:00

One of the best ways to attract people to your music related site is free downloads. Finding free music was always the problem, but with Musopen you will have a huge library you can share with your readers and more importantly get free music for your own enjoyement.

Musopen is a community driven, online music repository started by a music and economics college student named Aaron Dunn.

This site takes music that is in the public domain, meaning a work that belongs to the community, and has it recorded by individuals and college/community orchestras throughout the United States and stored online so it can be accessed for free through this website. This would do the following:
1. Provide free unlimited access to music in the public domain to anyone with internet access.
2. Allow obscure works, for example some Baroque music, to be recorded for the first time that would otherwise not be recorded because of its small profit potential.
3. Community – being a community driven project, this can create an online music community, perhaps leading to future cooperative projects.
4. Add usefulness to all the untapped talent in our nation’s orchestras. Think of about how many college orchestras perform to diminishing numbers of audiences. Now, every performance adds to the online repertoire, adding another reason to perform and perform well.
5. Create the first organization devoted to giving the public access to musical works which belong to them.

This project exists so that educational institutions and the general public can have free, unlimited access to all kinds of music that have expired copyrights. If there is music that by law now belongs to the general public, let's make sure that it is available to the public.

Getting Free Sound Clips

2006-10-11T23:35:00.000-07:00

There are a few places to get free sound clips in the web. FindSounds.com is a sound search engine dedicated to finding public domain sound clips. It works great for making your power point presentation more lively or just to put sounds in your home videos.

link: FindSounds

Wired has a Great list of Public Domain Movies

2006-10-09T02:39:00.000-07:00

I've had some great results promoting free movies in my sites, people just love the fact they can just download something for free, some for curiosity but others just for educational purposes. Recently Wired Magazine came out with a list of Public Domain Movies you can download in the Net. I'm having a hard time believing this but you can actualy dowload them fast in the Archive Website ( www.archive.org ).You can also host them in your site if you get those cheap hosting with large bandwidth.

List:

1) Detour (1945)
Snappy dialog, femme fatale, guilt-ridden hero, flimsy sets – it’s protonoir that helped launch a genre.

2) Driller Killer (1979)
Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant) directs and plays a homicidal artist. Not the 1948 dance hit Killer Diller.

3) Night of the Living Dead (1968)
George Romero’s gritty classic out-brains the avalanche of zombie flicks it inspired. Mmm ... brains.

4) Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)
It’s a Wonderful Life is out of the public domain? So what. The interplanetary battle for Christmas rules!

5) Superman cartoons (early 1940s)
Modern superhero flicks got nothin’ on these perfectly drawn shorts.

6) The Battle of San Pietro (1943)
Forget Private Ryan and get into real WW II bunkers with this gripping John Huston documentary.

Illustrations from Old Books.

2006-09-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

There's a great website I found inside digg which features old illustrations from old books. Most of the books featured are already in the public domain which makes them free for us to use. Bellow are some of the examples of illustrations from the 1900's. The site also carries a lot of scan images taken from images and engravings ( all open to them copyright free ).

The name of the website is easy to remember and tells you what site offers.

link: fromoldbooks

Public Domain Symbols and Icons

2006-09-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

There are some great public domain icons and symbols from the National Park Service. The agency which belongs to the federal government has released these graphics to the public.

You can find the more icons and symbols from their website, National Park Services Maps.

The Future is Video Content!

2006-08-14T02:24:00.000-07:00

The success of YouTube, Google Video and others like them is due to viral content. Videos which were specifically made for the web are spreading through blogs and even emails. You can also share in their success by imbedding videos from various Web 2.0 video sites in yours.

Another approach, which came because of these companies willing to pay for video bandwidth is to show complete movies. Showing just any movie is illegal in the Internet. But using the public domain concept to videos, your going to end up with a lot of clips and movies you can use in your site for free.

The following are some of the compilation or aggregate sites which allow you to show videos.
(Note on newer content we are not responsible to any of the content of the following sites, please respect any copyright laws some of them may still have)

YouTube - Web 2.0 Video Sharing Community.
Google Videos - Google's answer to Video Sharing.
Free Documentaries and Movies - Compilation of Public Domain Videos.
ifilm - Web 2.0 Video sharing Contender.
heavy - broadband videos and content( humor related ).

Learning from Example

2005-08-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

Building a rich content site requires a lot of work and dedication. There is no guarantee your website can make a profit at all and even if it does the odds are still against you.

There are webmasters who are successful at it and even found a way to get around on cutting the time of making content using free content available on the net. The secret to this is in the compilation of the rich information that freely available.

One great example is Internet world stat which is a website about world and country specific Internet statistics. Most of the information the webmaster used came from the CIA website which is giving it out for free and from various statistics related companies. Learn from this and you can successfully create a website rich in content and actually save on time on making it.

Wealth of Free Content from Forums

2005-08-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

You can get anything from online forums today. Creating a Joke site from scratch can easily be accomplished by just collecting free flash jokes and pictures from content makers who free give them out in forums in exchange for promoting their sites.

Remember there's only a few requirements on using free content, one which is to acknowledge the owner of the content and to abide by the conditions that has been set so you can use it for free.

Getting Some Great Black and White Photos

2005-08-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

I'm been looking around for black and white public domain photos and ended up in the US national archives. There are tons of great black & white photos you can use for free, but most of the pictures are old. Its hard to find great balck and white pictures today, the national archives is just the place to start your search.

Link: The National Archives

Free Public Domain Pictures

2005-07-07T20:32:00.000-07:00

Finding great pictures you can use for free is hard, here are some links I've compiled from some site my friends have sent me. Please be aware to always read the conditions before using the pictures.

Private Sites:
Stock.Xchng - One of the best place to get good photos on almost anything.
Morguefile - A perosonal site offering tons of beautiful photos.

Government Sites:
Nasa - multimedia archive search.
Nasa Space Gallery - Tons of amazing pictures.
National parks - Gallery of US National Parks.