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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?"

6 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. Indeed! by McCarrum · · Score: 4, Funny

    Torrent, the Backups of Champions.

    Beer, the Breakfast of Champions.

    --
    Robert Anton Wilson :: Rest in Slack
  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
  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.