At Park Community Church, a contemporary, non-denominational church of about 1,250 urbanites (20-45 year old) in Chicago, we are always looking to find the right way to express ourselves in our 8 minutes with God daily devotionals, in HTML emails, on our website and in print. Many times, we search and search for the right image to express the related content. The following is a great post by Gina Trapani at Life Hacker who lists out six great places you can find legally-republishable content on the web to impress the boss with a great multimedia presentation.
As the internet has evolved, so have the amount of free media available for you to use. Thanks to organizations like Creative Commons, licenses like the GNU Free Documentation License, and the public domain, there are tons of photos, songs, movies and documents freely available for you to download and republish without fear of the copyright police.
1. Creative Commons search interface
Video, music, images and documents
Creative Commons’ recently released tabbed search interface looks up CC-licensed photos from Flickr, any file type on Yahoo! and Google, and videos on Blip.TV. Very convenient. (Before you go publishing, be sure to check exactly which CC license that perfect photo carries – whether or not it can be modified, used for commercial purposes, or should include attribution.)
2. Wikimedia
Video, music, images, documents
User-edited Wikimedia Commons contains over 700,000 pieces of freely available, modifiable (even for commercial purposes) media that’s categorized and tagged by users. Need a photo of Chicago for your blog? Type Category:Chicago into the Wikimedia search box.
3. CCHits and CCMixter
Music
Find podcastable, remixable, put-your-iMovie-to-it music at the CCHits and CCMixter listings of Creative Commons-licensed songs.
4. EveryStockPhoto
Images
There are tons of stock photo sites:
but a really good one is EveryStockPhoto. ESP aggregates photos licensed for reuse from several free stock photo sources.
5. Google
Images, documents
While Google has an advanced search option to find reusable content (as does Yahoo!), some regular ol’ Googlefu works, too. For instance, to find Creative-Commons 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”
6. Public domain torrents
Video
This collection of public domain A and B movies is available for download via BitTorrent. Use it to spice up your indie film with a clip of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Tom and Jerry.
What a great blog, and we’d be happy to be helpful in any way. Thanks, Dina (dinaATblip.tv)