The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is being directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet.

Every mp3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by outdated copyright law. Are you a podcaster looking for pod-safe audio? A radio or video producer searching for instrumental bed music that won’t put your audience to sleep? A remix artist looking for pre-cleared samples? Or are you simply looking for some new sounds to add to your next playlist? The Free Music Archive is a resource for all that and more, and unlike other websites, all of the audio has been hand-picked by established audio curators.

Before I do that, I want to make sure everyone knows how to find images that are licensed for reuse. The Creative Commons license allows that, as long as you provide attribution – i.e., you have to give credit to the photographer. This video from the Creative Commons site makes it easy to learn how to search for CC-licensed images using the Firefox browser.

Watched the video? Know how to make sure your images are licensed for putting in your blog? Let’s go:

Among my favorite sources for this is flickr, with tons of images under the CC license from professional and amateur photographers around the world.

I’ve posted more stock image sources here and here and here at DV for Teachers. Have fun!

x-posted.

Need some guidance regarding copyright and online video? It was a topic of concern to many at NECC this year.

At American University’s Center for Social Media, take a look at their Online Video Resources guide to Fair Use and Online Video. The site goes deeply into the issues, and makes a solid resource for teachers and higher ed faculty looking for help with this thorny and evolving issue.

From NCSU’s Bethany Smith, via Twitter. Thanks, Bethany!

A very useful article on copyright in the classroom from Inside Higher Ed. The guidelines are not clear, but this goes far to help clarify the murk.

There are few circumstances in which it’s legal to copy a DVD and screen it in its entirety to an audience without paying royalties. One of them is in the classroom.

That exception and others make up a patchwork of laws and rulings on the use of media for educational purposes that some professors have attempted to navigate but many others ignore altogether. What constitutes “fair use” in classes that rely on films, television shows and assorted media clips? In some ways, it’s still an open question. Copyright law and court precedent set the limits, but within those limits, colleges, scholars, studios and lawyers have struggled to define when exactly it’s permissible to use artistic works in the classroom and in students’ assignments.

One scholarly group, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, seeks to clarify the boundaries with a new set of best-practices guidelines for fair use. Its creators hope that it will give professors a tool for interpreting existing law as well as provide a unified set of standards to eliminate confusion between instructors and college administrations.

Much more information in the complete article, and a valuable discussion after.

It’s small, but it’s a change. From today’s Quick Takes at Inside Higher Ed:

The Library of Congress on Monday published new copyright rules that give colleges slightly more leeway on the use of certain video materials in class, but some college librarians fear that the changes do not go far enough. The rules are part of a process in which the Librarian of Congress periodically considers exemptions from the general ban on altering without permission technology designed to block unauthorized use of videos or computer programs. The exemption created Monday applies to portions of videos that are held in college libraries and are used in classes by media studies or film studies professors. The regulations are complicated, and college copyright experts said Monday that they were still reviewing them. Pamela Snelson, college librarian at Franklin & Marshall College and president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, said that based on a first analysis, she was pleased to see the exemption added because “anything that adds to our availability is good.” She also said it was important for copyright officials to see that “we need this material to teach.” But she worried that the exemption was “too narrow,” and asked why professors in disciplines beyond film and media studies shouldn’t have the same flexibility for their courses.

A copy of the official announcement is here. This is a good step, and it means they’re paying some attention to our needs. We need to increase the pressure to allow our instructors and our students more leeway in using these works for educational and indeed artistic purposes.

One of the more frustrating things about debating copyright issues is that copyright mythology sounds a lot more like the truth than the truth. For instance, many people believe that copyright law gives the copyright holder absolute, immutable control over a work, lasting into perpetuity. The truth—that copyright has built-in limits to protect free speech, scholarship, research, and innovation (the “progress of science and useful arts”)—sounds like a lie. Surely all of that stuff is just bleeding-heart liberal, mushy-minded nonsense?

Oh, well, actually—no. Fair use exists, and for very good reasons.

Teachers and all of education depend on fair use in the classroom. Understand your rights to use the works of others as you write, make video, use photography, and be aware of the moneyed interests who would create tighter and tighter control over what you can do with the words and images and video and music you read, see and hear every day.

So, it’s Christmas today (or it will be tomorrow, depending on where you live). Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a bunch of freely and legally available Christmas songs you could listen to all day? Burn on CDs and hand over to your relatives? Share with your friends without the fear of being sued to death by big record labels?

Well, here’s a list of 110 128 songs which are all explicitly released under a Creative Commons license (no, I did not consider songs which are merely “podsafe”!) and thus can be shared, listened to, and sometimes even modified freely. There’s a great variety in style, mood, and genre of the songs: some traditional, some contemporary, some happy, some sad, and some just plain funny.