It can be very frustrating trying to be a good citizen in the Internet age, since our tangle of intellectual property laws were created in a time when individuals didn't generally publish their creative works to a worldwide audience. If you want to copy or mash up an image, audio, or video clip, it can sometimes be difficult or impossible to tell if the resource you want to use is copyrighted, and who the copyright holder might be.

The opposite problem can be just as frustrating. If you're creating a podcast or video blog and want some nice background music, how can you be a good citizen and find something which is not copyrighted?

So I'm creating this new category, Freesources, where I'm going to compile places to get copyright-friendly multimedia resources. By "copyright friendly," I mean that the images, audio, and video are usable for noncommercial purposes without permission. Public domain is best, but certain Creative Commons licenses are also good.

I'm mainly doing this for my own benefit, but I hope others find it useful, too. Also, if you have a good suggestion (I'm especially interested music), pass it along and I'll post it for everyone's benefit.

To kick things off with a bang, my first entry is NASA.

Public Domain Multimedia from NASA
Most material produced by the federal government is in the public domain (state governments are a different matter), and this is true of nearly everything on NASA's web site. Just about the only restriction is that you can't do anything to imply that NASA or any astronaut endorses any commercial product or service. They also want a "courtesy call" for some commercial use.

The wonderful thing is that NASA's web site is an amazing labyrinth of material covering just about everything outer space (and some things aviation). Nearly all of it is in the public domain, and many images are available free for download in high resolution formats suitable for high quality work.

For example, here's a page full of illustrations of hypothetical space colonies (thanks to my brother-in-law for the link). High quality artwork in the public domain.

Here's a gallery of NASA movies on various space-related topics. Download and mash up at will.

High resolution images from Hubble, with a helpful letter officially placing the images in the public domain (just in case anyone ever questions you).

You could spend quite a bit of time just exploring material on NASA's home page, but that's just scratching the surface. As befits a pork-barrel agency, NASA has branches and centers all over the place, and many of those have extensive online resources as well. Not all of this is well-linked, but if it's on nasa.gov, it's probably public domain.