Public Domain
Public domain is a great option for avoiding having to deal with the restrictions of copyright. Public domain simply means anybody can use this media for anything they’d like. Creative works that are made by U.S. government employees are automatically in the public domain. Work can also end up in the public domain after enough time has passed and the copyright expires.
The picture to the left is by Ansel Adams and was taken for the National Park Service so clearly there’s some surprisingly good stuff in the public domain. Public domain is a great place to find historical media.
Places to find public domain work
- Library of Congress Digital Collections – vast amounts of multimedia resources.
- Project Gutenberg – over 25,000 free electronic books available in a variety of formats.
- Public domain movies – I didn’t realize how many were available online
- Internet Archive – everything you can imagine and more (probably not a good place to have students “roaming”)
- U.S. Government Multimedia – a gateway to searching all of the U.S. government’s online media
