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A Repository for Multimedia in the Public Domain?

Posted by Cliff on from the free-beer-music-and-video-clearinghouse dept.

8tim8 asks: "I was looking through my uni's record library yesterday (where they have lots of old jazz records) and it made me wonder, Is there anything like Project Gutenberg for audio or video files? I'm not talking about just a place to download old audio or video files, I'm talking about somewhere that has lots of old broadcasts/movies, and has actually checked to verify that what they have is in the public domain. It seems like there must be lots of stuff in the public domain...is there a place that let's people access it?"

7 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. wikimedia.org by Nos. · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

  2. Archive.org by FlipmodePlaya · · Score: 5, Informative

    Archive.org Moving Images Repository: http://www.archive.org/details/movies Archive.org Live Music Repository: http://www.archive.org/audio/etree.php I believe they collaborate with other projects to assemble these repositories, for instance their text database has Project Gutenberg's works (among others).

  3. well, there are the community-run sites .. by torpor · · Score: 2, Informative

    .. maybe not all the google you want it to be, but we've been running our own, public archives on ampfea.org for a few years now. it is community-suported, 100%, and open as you want it to be.

    undoubtedly there are tons more sites like ours. we recently converted our resources [community-owned hardware on donated bandwidth] to serve torrents, and have more tricky stuff up our sleeves for artists wanting a place to put their works (ipod integration, etc.)

    we don't do much quality control, we do ask artists to stand by their work, and of course we have a discretionary control over content in order to protect ourselves from mis-use, but the purpose of the site is long-term archives under our own weight ..

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
  4. problem with pre-1972 sound recordings by rjnagle · · Score: 4, Informative

    Movies are a different matter, but from the standpoint of federal law, the public domain does not exist for pre-1972 recordings because they are not covered by federal copyright law. That's why you don't see much movement in multimedia sound recordings to establish a public domain.

    Shocking, eh?

    Here's a project to try to work around this restriction
    http://www.projectgramophone.org/TeleRead-Article- 01Nov2003.html

    Recently, there's been social pressures on uncommercial works to be released into something called the public domain.

    --
    Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
    1. Re:problem with pre-1972 sound recordings by rjnagle · · Score: 2, Informative

      Sorry, this pre-1972 preemption by state law applies to AUDIO recordings, not VIDEO recordings.

      See also
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domai n_films

      --
      Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
  5. Multimedia. by dasunt · · Score: 4, Informative
  6. Like Project Gutenberg? Oh... How about by InternetVoting · · Score: 5, Informative

    Project Gutenberg

    Did anybody notice that Project Gutenberg does do audio and video files?

    The wikipedia suggestions are good, also check out Creative Commons; not quite the same, but useful.