PhyloPic is an open database of life form silhouettes. All images are available for reuse under a Public Domain or Creative Commons license.
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posted by brundlefly
on Feb 4, 2012 -
20 comments
Brian Wood is a comic book writer, best known for his subversive
DMZ, which explores the city of New York in the aftermath of a second American civil war. He is now offering a 132-page artbook entitled "
Public Domain 2" in its entirety as a free download on his site.
posted by chmmr
on Jun 9, 2011 -
14 comments
The Stolen Scream. In 2006, photographer
Noam Galai posted a handful of dramatic self-portraits to
Flickr. Unbeknownst to him, his screaming face slowly took on a life of its own (often as a symbol of unrest or protest), appearing in
countless permutations the world over. In this mini-documentary, Noam is surprisingly pragmatic about his accidental fame, and the fact that he only got paid once for the legal use of the picture.
posted by O9scar
on May 5, 2011 -
26 comments
Every January 1 is
Public Domain Day, when new authors enter the public domain. Copyright law is "fiendishly complex", but using the generic "life plus seventy" rule, here are
some of the authors who enter the public domain today.
What could have been entering the public domain today under the pre-1978-era law (Fellowship of the Ring, Dr. Seuss, etc..).. but you can expect further endless extensions of copyright to come. More articles
here,
here.
posted by stbalbach
on Jan 1, 2011 -
115 comments
There are lots of great films in the public domain and many of them are online.
OpenFlix has 600, including a
bunch of Chaplin,
sci-fi and
horror B-movies,
film noir and HD versions of
The Kid, M and Night of the Living Dead.
Drelb has 400, including Buster Keaton's
The General and
Steamboat Bill Jr., episodes of
Bonanza and
Dragnet and
Three Stooges shorts.
Crazeclassics has over a 100, including
The Third Man, Roger Corman's
The Little Shop of Horrors,
Bringing Up Baby and
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Ampopfilms has 80, including
His Girl Friday,
Reefer Madness,
Destination Moon and the 1954 animated version of
Animal Farm.
Gravitas Ventures has 35, notably
Vampyr,
Death Rides a Horse and
Borderline.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 23, 2010 -
19 comments
In
2006, LibriVox released a small collection of traditional Christmas Carols, sung by volunteers from around the world, all in the Public Domain. It was a neat idea. Then, years of silence, no carolers came. Now it's
December 2009 and the carolers have returned, with a second larger collection of traditional carols. (
orig LibriVox page. Project page.)
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 19, 2009 -
7 comments
Sex Galaxy (
trailer 1,
trailer 2, NSFW) is a new film that
claims to be the first "green film," as it is made of 100% recycled material. In an
Wired article, director/producer Mike Davis discloses his film sources. "Boarded-up libraries, abandoned schools, decaying drive-in movie theaters…. These are the realms in which I unearth my wares," he said. "And actually, many of these films are available on the internet. You can find amazing collections through the
Library of Congress." The Wired article notes that the recycled material isn't itself wholly original, and
Bad Lit expands the history of film plunder further.
Sex Galaxy is sourced from
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, which relied on footage from
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, which in turn is sampled from the Russian film
Planeta Bur. The history of film reuse is long and storied, and continues after the jump.
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posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 27, 2009 -
17 comments
Classical Music at the European Archive. Free and legal lossless downloads of out-of-copyright recordings. Formats include WAV, FLAC, MP3 & Ogg.
posted by Gyan
on Mar 9, 2009 -
36 comments
"
The Baldwin Project seeks to make available online a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers of children. Our focus, initially, is on literature for children that is in the public domain in the United States. This includes all works first published before 1923."
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posted by bitter-girl.com
on Oct 5, 2008 -
10 comments
Barnacle Press : archive of mostly public domain newspaper comics. Loads of good stuff, but some highlights not previously mentioned include (especially)
Ella Cinders, an stylishly written flapper-Cinderella update; the less clever but still charming
Cinderella Suze; the appallingly cute
Diary of Snubs, Our Dog;
Foxy Grandpa, about a grandfather who outsmarts prank-happy kids;
The Hurry Up New Yorker, a kinetically drawn one-joke strip;
The Newlyweds' Baby, about a cartoon-sexually-dimorphic couple with a terrible baby;
Doesn't It Seem Strange, sort of a beautifully illustrated 'They'll Do It Every Time' for 1903-4;
Bringing Up Father, class comedy with lots of rolling pin violence; the freaky-deaky
Terrors of the Tiny Tads.
(Main link previously posted a couple of times in 2005, but new stuff has been added since then, and the site's been redesigned.)
posted by zusty
on Sep 2, 2008 -
22 comments
"For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that
the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable." How do you know? The renewal copyright records have traditionally been scattered and hard to access, but Google - with the help of Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word - has just released a single database as a
freely downloadable XML file.
posted by stbalbach
on Jun 25, 2008 -
54 comments
CreateSpace is the new name of Amazon's on-demand self-publishing service for the super long tail of books, audio CD's and film DVD/Blue-ray. Products automatically get an ISBN number and are listed on Amazon.com, including "Search Inside" for books. The National Archives and CreateSpace will be
publishing movies from its collection of over 200,000 public domain films, raising some provocative copyright issues.
posted by stbalbach
on Aug 8, 2007 -
34 comments
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales asks: Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license? Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it. And they do.
posted by divabat
on Oct 22, 2006 -
60 comments
Free Movies, Documentaries, Cartoons, TV-Shows, Music & Comedy -
100% handpicked content chosen to inform, educate, shock and entertain you. Most of the old films and cartoons are in public domain: "when a work's copyright or patent restrictions expire, it enters the public domain and may be used by anyone for any purpose." The newer media is probably not in public domain, they are just freely available for some unknown reason. Tomorrow they could be gone.
posted by crunchland
on Sep 18, 2006 -
19 comments
An anotated list of the best-selling classics, (
as compiled by
Book Magazine), showing the years in which they will become public domain under current copyright law. Fans of Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises will be in luck in 2021;
Memoirs of a Geisha will go public sometime in the early 2100s.
[Via Vidiot's brand new blog.]
posted by me3dia
on Aug 27, 2003 -
5 comments
"On Liberty" (1859),
John Stuart Mill's classic, is all over the Web, says this
article in Salon.
"It stands to reason that the Net would embrace Mill, and not only because his text is now in the public domain: The Internet is the vastest marketplace of ideas that mankind has yet managed to create. It's an unbounded and still growing embodiment of Mill's ideals."
posted by homunculus
on Aug 12, 2003 -
4 comments
Ask not what the public domain can do for you... (...ask what you can do for the public domain.) The
Eldred vs. Ashcroft folks are circulating a petition proposing a federal law requiring $1 copyright renewal after 50 years, or the work hits the public domain. The name-rank-serial# form has an interesting question: List something you have created using the public domain. Some of the answers:
Audiotexts of Aesop's Fables,
annotation of Descartes' Discours,
Digital Historia Numorum: A Manual of Greek Numismatics,
choral sheet-music library,
Mercury Theatre on the Air,
a pop opera based on Cyrano,
NASA images jigsaw puzzle,
French proverbs from 1611,
blind audio tactile mapping system,
Alexandre Dumas père website,
Light and Matter physics text,
Voice of Hibakusha: Eyewitness accounts of Hiroshima,
Distributed RNA Secondary Structure Prediction,
least-squares fitting library,
collection of chess problem books,
Philately of the Princely States of India,
Oremus Hymnal,
Allen Parker slave narrative site,
Samuel Johnson's Ramblers,
18th-century Chester Co. PA tax liststranslation of Jose Zorrilla's Don Juan (1844) ,
Digital South-Asia Language Archive,
Vedic etexts,
Gary Indiana U.S. Steel Works Photograph Collection, et al.
The above list was so diverse...led me to wonder, what works have Mefites created using public domain materials?
posted by jengod
on Jun 16, 2003 -
20 comments
