FREE RESOURCES ON THE INTERNET

If I had to license something I had created that I wanted to give away, I think I would go with Creative Commons. Although it sounds pretty simple, I wonder how that process would actually go? I'm not sure I'm totally clear on that. Just slap a

on it? Does it have to somehow be registered with the CC people so that there's no doubt? Or is the "CC" all it requires?

Now. Not being totally prolific in any of the artsy fields I'm good at (writing and filmmaking mostly), I question why I would ever want to give something away totally free (although I know I can put restrictions on just HOW "free" my product is). I know others are hyper-creative and love collaborating on music tracks with others around the world, love to do mashups and remixes, etc. (video and audio), or get their artwork out there and perhaps get known and get paying jobs from that, but that's not my thing. I would rather get paid for my work so that I have the time and freedom to do more of it! I love writing, and people seem to like what I write (social media postings, my own blog, articles, guest-blogging, etc.), but it's very time-consuming and there's very little money in it unless you devote even MORE time to it and start doing product placement, ads, etc., and really work at it.

EXAMPLE: I wrote a piece for a well-funded Georgetown University website started by a former Washington Post writer. She was going to pay me $150 for about 450 words, BUT they were going to own it. No other site (and some wanted to) would be able to reprint it, even with payment or accreditation. The whole point of their new site was "original content." Any other site could only link to them. The piece I wrote was part of my own personal life story, and I simply wasn't going to have anyone owning my life story! So I did it for free and for the publicity. 

They did a super ugly interface with no pictures (except that one little nun on right): http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/forum/what-is-it-like-being-married-to-jesus

Since I owned it, I turned to Life Teen (who pays me to do movie reviews) and asked them to run it for me, because I knew they would do fun graphics and they have a wide reach: http://lifeteen.com/really-like-married-jesus/

I enjoyed researching the "read-write," interactive, sharing, collaborative, user-generated, democratized web for this class because I was forced to do it in a kind of "baptism by fire" way when I was creating my documentary. My best sources? Other filmmakers who were familiar with these often hidden, unobtrusive sites that have free treasures. The production company I worked with also knew the best sites to get pay reasonable amounts of money for high-quality clips.

Below is an actual example of two pieces of masterpiece art that are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN that I used in the film. The first is Giotto (not many of his works available!) and the second is a lesser known Spanish artist, Murillo. I found them at a website called www.RestoredTraditions.com found simply by Googling images. You can by a high resolution scan from them for whatever use. They vouched for it being public domain and I guess I just TRUSTED them and went with it. I also used www.archives.org for historic black and white footage (since my documentary is historical). 

Why would archives.org make historical footage as well as things like unclaimed, anonymous home movies available? As a kind of "common good," "patrimony of the human family" kind of thing. People with a sense of community and history don't want these artifacts going lost--so they put them out there to be used. I noticed that foundations like the MacArthur Foundation helped fund this website, so in a sense, it's philanthropy for both the past and the future.