When working with digital media, you sometimes need to find other images, music and video to tell your stories. Whether those stories are in the form of an image, a blog post or a movie, having some extra media you can use can do wonders for establishing and supporting the context of your story - sometimes even being the focal point!
Below are 7 resources you can use to find this content. It's royalty-free or Creative Commons licensed.
- Videos – Internet Archive
- Sounds – freesound home page
- Music – Magnatune
- Music - Freeplay Music
- Music - Royaltyfree Music
- Images – Flickr Creative Commons
- General Content – Creative Commons Search
Inspired?
CuriousWorks is a tiny company in Sydney, Australia. We have 4 staff and no ongoing funding. Every contribution you can make to the toolkit - in your own way - will help us advocate, maintain and evolve it into a permanent resource for all of us!
Here are four ways you can contribute to the toolkit and help us keep it going.
- Let us know if you use any of these ideas, workshops or techniques in your community - simply comment on the posts you find most useful and share links to your work so we can check it out! If you want a private, community-minded space to share your media - and keep the copyright - check out CuriousWorks' portal for doing just that, All Around You.
- If you end up devising any projects in your community through the toolkit, we humbly request for you to share this little badge on your project's website.
- We'd love to post about workshops, ideas and tips that worked for you - if you'd like to contribute, please contact us at toolkit@curiousworks.com.au.
- Donate to CuriousWorks. As we're a registered Australian charity, all donations over $2 are tax deductible. Stipulate in your donation that you'd like it to go to directly to the toolkit and we'll make sure every cent is spent on evolving and maintaing this resource for the benefit of communities everywhere looking to tell their story.
Copyright & Archive.org
I will preface the following statement with this; I am not a copyright lawyer. I'm an new media artist/educator. Do not take the below as bona fide legal advice!!!!
Here's an uncool commentary on copyright in a remix culture, speciafically discussing, but not limited to, Archive.org.
Archive.org is an awesome resource, but a lot of the video material - specifically that material designated Public Domain on the website - is royalty free under American Copyright law, but possibly still protected under Australian law. This especially would hold true for the Bugs Bunny & Superman animations that are available for download from Archive.org (where the likeness/trademark is actively protected by Warner Brothers) and the much remixed classic, George R. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (a favorite with boys 14 to 40. Urgh... Urgh...).
This means little in an educational context, where you have people remixing to learn & play; it is highly unlikely Universal, Sony, Paramount etc is coming after you. Where people are working on public performance (VJ, public projection, projection in performances [theatre, music] etc), there is a higher likelyhood of the work being seen on a wider context and then there might be issues.
This is the same situation many sample heavy music styles (hip hop/techno) have dealt with over the past ten years (law suits, attribution, paying sampled artists) and one that could well raise it's head in a moving visual context.
In an educational context, Archive.org is a great gateway to discussions around copyright with students/participants, especially in relation to sampling and the risk involved in the practise. Copyright is a risk management situation and it is the resposibility of the artist/teacher to know the risks before taking them, before encoruaging students/participants to essentially to 'break the law' after a fashion. This is not meant to sound dramatic; it is a statement of fact
To qualify the above; I have used the Bugs Bunny, Superman, Betty Boop videos, as well as Duck and Cover and a host of educational reels from archive.org in video art making workshops for six years before having the the copyright infringement situation brought to my attention. I still use these video resources in those workshops, but have worked a discussion into the workshop process about & around copyright.
The Copyright Australia and the Arts Law Centre are great resources when in doubt. Thier views at times differ - at times - to those of Creative Commons Australia, which is a good thing; it is always good to hear healthy debate.