Copyright is automatic unless waived
- If you'd like people to be able to use your images or music in their own projects (or want to use other's work for your project) consider a Creative Commons License. A computer programmer turned singer-songwriter, Jonathan Coulton aka 'JoCo' made his songs available to anyone who wanted to use them as a soundtrack for their videos, and as a result a huge number can be found on YouTube providing him with free publicity.
- Nickelodeon's parent company Viacom sued Google/YouTube and provided evidence that the founders were happy to exploit copyrighted material to grow their popularity and user base. Nickelodeon themselves went against the trend of issuing cease and desist orders against people who put up YouTube clips, and instead ran ads under the clips along the lines of 'if you enjoyed this, watch more at Nickelodeon'. The mash-up Gotye has edited together from fan videos for his hit Somebody that I used to Know.
- Kevin McKleod at incompetech is becoming well known as a composer of atmospheric music for film-makers, and is a favourite of my son Jamie for his Lego animations. Free or cheap licensed music from Jamendo.
Digital Millenium Copyright Act. DRM (Digital Rights Management) issues. Peer to peer filesharing rights, wrongs & risks of using the likes of Pirate Bay & BitTorrent.
While you can use Photoshop to add a © text layer with reduced opacity to your images to deter online theft (handy for eBay) you can also add an invisible digimarc from the bottom of the Filters menu. On Windows you can get the © symbol by holding down Alt and typing 0169 on the numeric keypad, or Alt g on a Mac. no right click
- royalty free photography - stay within copyright laws using stock photography, it can be surprisingly cheap (or indeed free if you find the right site). My current favourite is 123RF, you pay about £29 to buy enough credits for 29 Web sized images, or a fewer number at a higher resolution for magazines. You can also download images at low resolutions and watermarks for use in 'comping' - putting together a mock-up to show a client prior to spending money/dreits on an image that may be rejected by your customer. If you are a photographer then consider uploading some of your own images to earn commission.
- Other good stock photo sites include: istockphoto.com; www.shutterstock.com; www.corbisimages.com and Adobe has relaunched its own offering, integrated with its CreativeCloud.
- Free options include Google advanced image search (hidden under the gear wheel)
with licensing options at the bottom of the list set to free to use.
- Flickr Commons
- Classic books are available from project gutenberg
