Rebecca Potterfield's List: Media Resources

Much of the music found on the Free Music Archive is released under Creative Commons licenses. What we are highlighting here is just a small portion of the massive amount of free and reusable music available from artists who use CC and are ready to share.

Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.

You don't need photos to add photos

 

Fotopedia enables you to select photos from a large pool of Creative Commons licensed photos which are reusable. You can also reuse photos already in Fotopedia.

A: Some, but not all, of the FMA library is pre-cleared for these types of uses. Visit the track page for the song you've downloaded to find licensing info, including attribution requirements. To find the Track Page, click the name of the track you want to use, or click on the "i" button. It'll take you to a page like this. In the bottom right-hand corner of that track page, you'll find licensing info like the following:

 

 

Get Twisted by Double Helix is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

 

 

Click the name of the license to see exactly what kinds of uses are pre-cleared under this license, under what conditions, and to determine whether your proposed use fits the criteria. This particular track -- like most of what you'll find on the FMA -- is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses have four different clauses, and you can read more about them here.

 

In Search Mode, you may filter content by pre-cleared uses -- for example, content that can be used in a video project, or a commercial project. If you find a track this way, you'll still want to verify that you are following the terms of the license linked from the track page.

 

Remix and Video Artists: If a track says "FMA-Limited" or "NoDerivatives", then you'll need to get permission from the copyright holder to use the track.

 

We strongly encourage anyone who wishes to use music found on the FMA to familiarize themselves with copyright law, Creative Commons licenses, and the public domain to independently assess whether any given musical work or sound recording can be used in their project. The Free Music Archive seeks to prevent copyright infringement and complies as a service provider with the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), but does not review music uploaded by users of the site to determine if the music is subject to additional restrictions.

FMA artists give their permission through licenses.  A license is an agreement that prescribes the terms under which a copyrighted work may be used.  Many of the licenses that cover works on the Free Music Archive are so-called “Creative Commons” (or “CC”) licenses.  CC offers a suite of pre-written licenses, each of which comes in three formats: one that humans can read, one that lawyers can read, and one that computers can read. The majority of FMA's artists Curators use CC licenses to comprehensibly express the kind of permission they want to give.

 

 

 

Could you explain the CC licenses?

 

 

 

Currently, there are six CC licenses, which allow varying degrees of use and impose varying requirements on users. To achieve this diversity of options while keeping things relatively simple, CC mixes and matches four key license terms: Attribution, NonCommercial (“NC”), NoDerivatives (“ND”), and ShareAlike (“SA”).

 

 

 

A brief rundown of the terms: NC allows you to use the licensed work non-commercially (which means you need additional permission from the rightsholder before using the work for commercial purposes); ND means you cannot build upon or remix the work; SA allows you to remix a work so long as you share it under the same CC license that covers the original work; and Attribution, which is currently in every CC license, requires you to give credit to the rightsholder when you use the work.

 

 

 

For a more detailed explanation of CC’s license terms and a summary of each individual license, click here.

All graphics submitted to the project should be waived of all rights, including copyright, according to the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. If you'd like to help out, please join the mailing list. Also, browse the archives to review the project's history.

Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The license conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description page. The Wikimedia Commons database itself and the texts in it are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. More information on re-use can be found at Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia and Commons:First steps/Reuse.

This category is a copyright status category for media files on Commons published under Creative Commons licenses.