Creative Commons Search

• Creative Commons Search Function - With one click lets you search Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Blip.tv and more for CC licensed material (uses tabs to let you explore).

Sound Effects

• The FreeSound Project - Great range of samples, all licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling license.
• SoundSnap.com - A bunch of completely free (public domain) sound effects and samples arranged by topic. 

Music and Songs

• Open Music Search - A customised Google search which hunts through most sources of open music and sounds.
• PodSafe Audio - Songs, by genre or artist, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 license.
• OpSound - Songs, scores and samples under different Creative Commons licenses.
• ccMixter - Songs, licensed using different Creative Commons types, featuring one or more samples of previous work (all legally sampled).

        (Also, for all sorts of audio, see the main Creative Commons Audio page for new and exciting sounds and music.)

Images

• Flickr's Creative Commons Pool. (Flickr is the world's largest photo-sharing website; some of the photos are licensed under Creative Commons licenses and can be re-used depending on the terms of that license; not all are legally reusuable, so make sure you check the licenses if you find Flickr images in a different way that coming in through the CC Pool page.)
• Three very easy to use tools for find images and photos under particular Creative Commons licenses are:  and FlickrCC, CompFight and PictureSandbox.  Also, if you're after just the high-quality CC-licensed photos on Flickr, then Behold is the tool for you (this is especially useful if you're preparing print-quality work).
• OpenPhoto - Stock images, all of which are legally reusable.
• For a fantastic list of free stock photos, see Laura Milligan's '100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images'.

Video

• The Internet Archive's Moving Image Section: This is the main directory for all of the open-access video stored in the Internet Archive.
• Blip.TV: blip.tv allows users to explicitly license their content (unlike, for example, YouTube). As such, many clips are legally reusuable depending on the license on each individual clip.
• OurMedia Video: OurMedia is a community-driven website with many, many different types of media which are, for the most part, Creative Commons licensed. The video section is great, but there are also audio
• Lum Skop: Motion graphics and animation available under Creative Commons lincensing, including High Definition (1920x1080) formats.
• Public Domain Torrents: Bittorrent files of feature-length films which are now in the public domain.  (Obviously these are large files and you need a bittorrent client to download them).
• EMOL Free Movie List: Also public domain films and television, considerable cross-over with other sites, but with direct-downloads rather than bittorrent files. Also, can be viewed by genre.
• US National Archives Video (hosted by Google): Historical footage, US-government made advertising and (the best bit) archive footage from NASA.
• Wikimedia Commons Videos: A decent archive, sorted by categories, but the videos are in OGG format and either need a specific codec or transcoded for use in most media players and editors.

Please note, all of the video archives have a mix of public domain, Creative Commons (and other copyleft) and material under traditional copyright.  You MUST check the licensing on every video clip you use, and keep 100% accurate records of the source and copyright status of each clip.  Your best advice is to keep in mind this tip from the Internet Archive:

"Who owns the rights to these movies?

This will vary for practically every movie in the archive.  We are endevouring to make it easy to understand what you can do with these movies, but this is a work-in-progress. Many of the movies and collections are licensed with Creative Commons Licenses. If the movie has a CC License, it will be noted on the movie's detail page. Click on this link to find out exactly what the permissions are for that particular film. Some films may have the contact information listed for the filmmaker. If the information is provided, feel free to contact the filmaker or organization the film comes from.  If there's no license, you should assume that the only thing you're allowed to do with it is watch it."

 

 

How-to Guides

• Not sure how to create or manipulate a particular media type? A good port of call is OurMedia's Learning Centre which has lots of how-to guides for audio, video and image manipulation. For video production, Blip TV's Learning Centre is also pretty good.

 

How to License and Mark Your Material

• Beyond simple text, there are some good pre-prepared images to allow you to mark your own work if you choose a Creative Commons license.  The general page on marking is here, which links to pages for specific media types, such as this page for marking video.

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