Copyrights & How To Avoid Problems

If you are posting things to the web or producing permanent interp signs, you probably want to be a little more careful about protecting copyright than you might be if you were just generating a piece of paper for use in the classroom. While most educational uses are far less restricted than commercial uses, there are still some requirements--other people like to be credited for their work, even when there is no monetary payment required. Here is some good information about copyright law.

Terms like open-source, shareware, royalty-free don't necessarily mean free of cost. Be sure to read the requirements of use for anything you grab. I like Creative Commons (CC) licensing. It's pretty clear about which rights are granted to the public & which are not (generally just commercial uses). Here's a detailed description of the different types of CC licenses. You can also put a Creative Commons license on your own work once it's on line if you like.

Use this link to search for CC content.

Free Media

If you find additional good sources of free media, let me know & I'll add the link to this list.

Music:

Despite all the easy on-line utilities for sharing digital files, grabbing any old music file is a touchy subject right now because of all the file-sharing lawsuits, some of which targeted schools. Basically, you have no legal right to use commercial music for virtually anything except listening to it by yourself after having purchased it.

If you decide to ignore this caveat, be very, very careful about where you download commercial music. It's become common to disguise very nasty computer viruses as music files that will wreck your machine. People who download a lot of music often use a dedicated machine that they can just reformat every time it gets hit.

"Royalty-free" music means that you don't have to pay future royalties for additional uses like broadcast or DVD, but you still have to buy the music up front. Maybe better to think about using Creative Commons (CC) licensed music. Finding it is a bit of a trick, but I LOVE these sites with very friendly use policies...basically just give them a link-back &/or credit:

• ccMixter: a popular, credible CC music site.
• Kevin MacLeod: a fantastic soundtrack composer with wide range & an obvious sense of humor.
• Jimmy G: mostly mellow piano & guitar, but a few oddities like heavy metal, electronic & spanish guitar.
• Anthony Kozar: interesting tonal music & abstract experimental stuff, some written by a computer algorythm. Some pipe organ recordings, too.
• Audionautix: download fantastic pieces from a wide variety of soundtrack genres.
• Danosongs: pop music, some odds & ends like techno, world.
• PerlssDj is a Spanish composer who does eerie atmospheric mixes that are often made available under a CC license.
• Peach Stealing Monkeys are a bit indescribable, producing wild Trip-Hop, often with a ukulele, that's available under a CC license for non-commercial uses. 
• Free Soundtrack Music: "Tracks on this site are available for royalty-free use in films, video games, YouTube videos or other digital multimedia productions. The recordings labeled as "FREE" do not require any payment or registration: these tracks may be edited and mixed into media productions without specific authorization or subscription."
• SoundSnap.com: Not free, but affordable. "A membership site with a nice selection of very modern sounds and music loops." 
• Musopen: old classical music is out of copyright, so anyone can use it...but each performance IS owned, so you can't just use any recording you find. Musopen is an absolutely fantastic resource: using crowd funding, they paid for performances that you can download & use for free. 

• PublicDomain4U.com: "Recordings of songs published prior to 1922, which are now in the public domain."

If you have a website or blog, some royalty-free music is available free of charge in exchange for a link on your site. Google around for "royalty-free music" &/or check with these folks about their current policy:

• Massive Tracks
• Royalty Free Music.com
• Jewelbeat.com

Other ideas:

• If you ask nicely, many musicians will allow you to use their music for non-commercial projects. Find their MySpace page or website & use the contact link. I don't think I'd bother trying this with a huge commercial act...they probably get way too many requests & likely don't even own their own music anymore.
• If you don't know what you need yet, MP3 search engines like BeeMP3 allow you to listen to entire tracks & find oddball recordings before you commit to an uncertain purchase.

You can also just make your own music or sound tracks & avoid the whole issue, even if you don't play a musical instrument.

• Garage Band: packaged with Apple i-Life, this cheap program lets you create your own tracks using pre-recorded loops or virtual instruments you play yourself. You can also use it to teach yourself piano or guitar using downloadable lessons. If you already have Final Cut Studio for video editing, you can also use the more powerful Soundtrack Pro to do the same things & more.
• SmartSound Sonicfire Pro: while not free, this is a cool, affordable program that provides a music library with customization tools, including "mood mapping" & timing controls.

Sounds: 

• Freesound Project: sounds only, not music.
• Macauley Library: Cornell University's unbelievable collection of bird & animal recordings.
• FindSounds: a fantastic sound file search engine. 
• SoundDogs.com: Not free, but affordable. "Huge selection of sound effects with quick downloads and good prices." 
• The US government: the reason MTV chose an astronaut on the moon as its original logo image isn't just that it's cool...it's also free. If you search around, you can find really interesting sound files from the NASA Apollo Program, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, etc.

Voiceovers:

• Voice123.com: Not free, but affordable. An interesting website where you post jobs and voiceover pros audition for you.
• Jack Scott Voice Productions: Not free, but affordable. Great quality, excellent customer service, and very reasonable prices. 

Photos:

You can always ask the web master for permission to use anything you find, but it's less trouble to just get a royalty-free photo to begin with.

• Sagehen Photos: Sagehen's website has lots of on-line photos free for educational use. Subjects range from aerial imagery, to wildlife, to botany, to field science & education, to historical shots from Sagehen's past. Let us know if you use anything so we can show the value to our funders.
• Wikimedia Commons: a database of 1,594,783 freely reusable media files to which anyone can contribute. Upload your own good shots to teach kids the power of open-source.
• Government public domain images: images produced with tax dollars are free to use. They include amazing quality & variety, like images from National Parks, Fish & Wildlife, FEMA, DOD, NOAA, NASA & more.
• morgueFile: these are free high-resolution images for when you need to print big.
• Free low-resolution images: these are professional images that you pay for if you want higher resolution. The free versions are perfect for websites or even for printing very small.
• Microsoft Clipart: the clipart gallery that comes with Microsoft Word [& other word processing programs] is surprising & often overlooked. Not just crappy line-drawings, it includes photos that are not as tiny as they look & can often be scaled very large. These photos are incredibly useful because they are shot professionally, then cropped &/or stylized to remove extraneous information, making them very effective symbolic communication. If you want to change the image rather than just insert it into your Word or PowerPoint document, then copy & paste into an image-manipulation program like Photoshop [see "Open Source Software", below]. You can search through thousands of clipart images & download them from Microsoft.
• Stock Exchange: a great stock photo site. There are both free & for-fee images on the site. Big annoying watermarks will let you know which is which :)
• PicFinder: a search engine that looks for stock photography that is completely free to use. "Find images based on what you have to do to use them, whether licensed under Creative Commons, GNU, a site-specific agreement, or something else. PicFindr can even find free images you can use commercially without requiring permission or credit of any kind!"
• A big list of public domain image sources.

Video:

• Prelinger Archives: an amazing collection of down-loadable historic & contemporary video ephemera--all free! The Internet Archive that contains the Prelinger collection is also a great place to find other free media files like audio, graphics, etc.
• National Archives: the U.S. National Archives include video images available for free use, but you will either have to arrange a representative or visit Washington or one of the regional offices yourself to copy the files. You can do a lot of research on line before you get there, though.
• Macauley Library: Cornell University's unbelievable collection of bird & animal recordings includes videos.
• Zadie.com maintains a list of free film making forms, software & other useful assets.

Fonts:

Sometimes you need a different type-face than the standards that came installed on your computer. Be aware that this means you will need to embed your new oddball font in any PDF, Word, PowerPoint or Photoshop files you produce with it so that others can actually see the text--this means bigger file downloads [if you are saving your work as a non-editable file like a .jpg image, for instance, this isn't a concern]. So don't use funky fonts for no reason--be sure you really need them to support the message of the image or document. Always look for True-Type fonts for maximum compatibility.

• Font Garden: a great collection of free fonts (a few are bad quality & won't load, though). You can even have them make a font from your handwriting.

Books: despite the best lobbying efforts of large corporations, copyrights do eventually expire. In the case of books & other publications, there are several sites that are madly digitizing out-of-copyright material for free distribution on the web. So why pay for the classics?

• Project Gutenberg
• Google Books: Google even digitizes copyrighted books, so that you can do incredibly useful things like search for text, even if you can't actually download the whole thing for free.
• Wikisource: an online library of free content publications collected and maintained by the community.
• Wikibooks: free, open-content textbooks.
• Wikiversity: a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.
• Distributed Proofreaders: using open source materials is only half the fun. Get involved in the community by producing some of your own. DP digitizes out-of-copyright material & volunteers proofread it.

Media File Conversion Tools

Digital files can be a real pain. You often need a different format than you happen to have, so here are some tools to help you get things into a form you can actually use.

• Video/audio converters...
• Media Converter: if your file is under 150MB, try this on-line converter.
• Xilisoft: you're on PC & you've got a flash video file & you need .wmv? Need .aiff audio from .flac? Try this free utility for video or audio conversions.
• ffmpegX: incredibly powerful but unintuitive video/audio encoder for Macs. If you can't convert from & to your desired formats with this one, it probably can't be done. Non-power users might prefer a demo of something simpler.
• VoltaicHD: if you're shooting high-definition video on a recent consumer camera, it probably came as quite a shock that you can't actually work with AVCHD footage on many editing platforms yet. VoltaicHD is the cheapest, easiest application I've found to convert those AVCHD .mts files to easily managed .mov files. I haven't found a free app that can do this.
• Handbrake: someone hands you a DVD they shot of the District Championships for your high school project. Great, now what? The DVD format was designed to be difficult to copy & duplicate. Handbrake takes what used to be a major, multi-step undertaking & makes it easy...for free. Beware that while duplicating copyrighted material for personal use on another device is legal, cracking the encryption to actually do that is not. Surreal, I know. Don't worry, they'll soon be out of business. In the meantime, complain to your Congressmen.
• Video/audio capture...
• Audio Hijack Pro, Replay: while there are plenty of completely legitimate, legal reasons to do so, it can be incredibly trying to capture or download a usable digital media file from the internet. The slickest way to bypass all the maddening formatting issues is to simply capture signals as they play through your computer system. There are lots of applications that can help you do this, but all are not equal: the two I linked are really simple & effective. You can download free, limited-functionality demos.
• Image converters...
• GimpShop: discussed above, GimpShop is a free image-editing program that can also be used to convert images between formats.
• PDFs: Adobe's proprietary Portable Document Format is both a blessing & a curse. While easy to create with export filters built into office packages, editing these documents requires Adobe Acrobat [not just Acrobat Reader], which is definitely not free. But you can get free apps to do useful things like split up large documents, add blank pages or combine multiple PDF files into a single new PDF. Google around or try Combine PDFs, PDF Lab [Mac], or A-PDF [PC].

Open Source & Free Software

Software can be downright expensive. It can be less than optimal for your needs &/or uncustomizable. Some products--like Microsoft operating systems, for instance--are getting ridiculously irritating to manage, even for legitimate purchasers.

And you can get in big trouble for loading your software on more computers than you have licenses.

Fortunately, there are many, many free software applications available out there, especially for PCs (Macs have rather fewer options). Even many commercial software apps have a limited time or functionality version available for free. Some things I have downloaded recently & found very useful include image editing, web editing, video capture, sound editing, file format converters, FTP utilities, password crackers (for my own network machines!).

Open Source software means the actual source code is out there for anyone who wants to use or modify it.

Operating systems: tell Microsoft where they can stick their obnoxious, difficult Windows activation codes! There are excellent open-source versions of Linux operating systems out there, many of them absolutely free. FYI, different versions of Linux are called "distributions". These distributions are targeted at different users & some are not free. Some distributions are really technical & specific, but many are incredibly user-friendly with familiar-looking graphical user interfaces (GUIs) just like Windows. Here are some great Linux distributions that work well for teachers & have good support communities working on them:

• Ubuntu: from the web-site..."Ubuntu is a community developed, linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need - a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more."
• Xubuntu: got old computers with not much oomph? Xubuntu is Ubuntu-light.
• Edubuntu: Ubuntu for education! Here are some screenshots showing the program package, including some of the educational programs.

Office packages: even if you don't want to change operating systems, you can still use open-source office software instead of Microsoft Office. They use common document formats so you can share files with Windows users, just like you do now

• Open Office "is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose."
• NeoOffice "is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X."
• Firefox browser: a popular, free, open source web browser to replace the invasive Internet Explorer.

Image editing: there are some free, open-source image editing software packages out there that are often as good or better than the commercial ones that cost hundreds of dollars:

• GimpShop: GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.
• Seashore: is an open source image editor for Mac OS X. Unlike the GIMP, Seashore only aims to serve the basic image editing needs of most computer users, not to provide a replacement for professional image editing products.

Web-authoring software:

• Nvu: A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users, rivaling programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. 

Library tools: 

• Zotero: for anyone creating research reference libraries or bibliographies, this is a powerful, easy, free tool that beats the pants off commercial offerings like EndNote by integrating on-line reference libraries, word processors, & browsers with these solely bibliographic filing applications. There's nothing else quite like it.
• LITA blog: open source programs for reference librarians & anyone else who needs to organize data collections.

Other:

• Tucows is a great place to start your search for useful tools.
• Widgets are little tiny programs that run on your desktop or web page, often using on-line data. Some of them are really educational & useful. It's not a massive programming challenge to make or modify your own widgets, either. You can get them for Macs or PCs.
• Gnu: is an organization that promotes the development of open-source software. Try Googling "gnu _" for whatever you need, i.e. "gnu zip utility", "gnu backgammon", etc.
• Software for Macs: A lot of free software for Macs is really just junkfood, but these sites have good links:

1. The Free Mac Classroom has links to many, many really useful & powerful free Mac applications.
2. Central Queensland University has a Centre for Open-source development & maintains good downloads of free software for Macs.
3. Opensource Mac
4. This blog has a good list.
5. Softpedia has lots of Mac application demos.