Carolinian

Issue date: 1/24/06 Section: Life

Media Credit: PUBLIC DOMAIN The icon Wikipedia and Wikibooks use to designate a work as having no copyright, or having passed into the public domain.

Except under special circumstances most copyrighted work is considered in the "Public Domain" if it was created before 1923, if the last creator died at least 70 years ago or whenever the copyright lapses or expires. It's a beautiful idea - essentially the legal acknowledgement that, when a work has done what it can for its author and his family it, after a reasonable period of time, belongs to the world.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what that means: most of the world's great music, movies, film and literature qualifies. Want the complete works of Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Leo Tolstoy? They're yours for free - if you know where to find them.

That, my friends, is where the Internet comes in. If you know where to look you can find just about anything on the net, for free. And, when you're looking for things that have passed into the Public Domain, you don't even have to pretend to feel guilty about it the way you would when surfing Kazaa or Soulseek for bad porn or that William Shatner version of "Rocket Man" that makes milk squirt out of your nose.

Here are my favorite places to enjoy the rich bounty of our shared artistic past…free of charge:



THE INTERNET ARCHIVE
(www.archive.org)

It's not the prettiest or easiest to navigate, but this archive has the goods - from hundreds of recordings of presidential speeches to a collection of those great, old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons. Lots of great text and images, too - but this one's most impressive for the staggering number of audio recordings (speeches, radio shows, etc), old cartoons and feature films that can be had for free. My personal favorite? the 'Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe" black-and-white movie serials your grandfather used to save nickels to go see on Saturdays. Or, for the more high-brow among us, that great old film noir flick your pretentious friends keep saying you simply must see, even though you can't find it anywhere. Yeah - they've got that one.

PROJECT GUTENBERG
(www.gutenberg.org)

Started in 1971 on one of the 15 computers on the network that would become the Internet, Project Gutenberg has grown into an international, non-profit effort to "break down the barriers of ignorance and illiteracy." The project now boasts more than 17,000 free, easily accessible plain-text e-books in its archive. The texts range from Dante's "Divine Comedy" and James Joyce's "Ulysses" to 'The Complete Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci" and "The Kamasutra."

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools