Free content
Open source and public domain cultural resources
August 31, 2014 — October 7, 2024
content
making things
photon choreography
Are you an inveterate remixer? Do you have a taste for collage? A blog you wish to illustrate with public domain images?
Here I note repositories of legally available content for remixing and mashing up. (Check for remix rights in your local jurisdiction, I ain’t no lawyer.)
1 General
- Open Culture tracks “675 Free Movies, 550 Free Audio Books, 600 Free eBooks, 170 Free Textbooks, 300 Free Language Lessons…”. AFAICT everything here is legit but once again, be careful and check the laws in your jurisdiction.
2 Audio
This is a major passion of mine, so I have too many opinions about it to fit under a subheading. See sample libraries, musical corpora.
3 Images
See free content: images.
4 Books, pretty and/or interesting
See free content: books.
5 Clip art and icons
- undraw is one source. From the Hacker n00bs thread we also find…
- The Noun Project
- FreeSVG
- Ouch! is a bunch of quirky/chunky illustrations of common situations for your quirky/chunky website.
- Humaaans provides paper-doll identikit people
- So does fresh folk.
- illustrations.co is a 100-illustrations-in-100-days thing
- Isometric does isometric illustrations.
- Glaze: stock vector illustrations via crowdsourcing and profit-share
- Lukasz Adam’s collection is a productive solo illustrator’s loss-leader
- fontawesome provides line-art as a font; some cleverness is required to convert it to SVG, or one can get downloads and other expanded features via a subscription
6 3d models
See 3d data.
7 Film
- World’s cinema has copies of many art-house films. Provenance unclear and thus suspect.
- Content on torrent aggregators like torrends.to, thepiratebay.net, demonoid.is, ww1.1337x.buzz, 1337x.to and rarbg.to is not necessarily violating copyright, but in practice, 90% of the content one finds there will be in violation in most western jurisdictions, and it is best to steer clear if you wish to be safe from committing copyright violations.