CMU School of Drama


Friday, January 23, 2015

80,000 Media Assets Freely Available Via The Public Domain Project

Co.Design | business + design: It can be hard for artists, designers, photo editors, and other creatives to track down Public Domain materials for their work. A number of resources offer copyright-free material—like Shutterstock or the National Archives—but none are so vast and localized as the Public Domain Project, launched this week by royalty-free video marketplace Pond5.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is super exciting, and I'm also kind of surprised to see that this is the first company to actually put together an extensive database. It seems like the kind of project that Google might want to take up, so it’s also kind of cool to see an outside name working on it. I’m also a little bit surprised that this wasn’t a bigger deal on larger news organizations, because this is an incredibly valuable resource. It’ll be interesting to see how companies that sell stock images and videos and vectors react to this new database and if they actually take a hit at all because of it. I bet graphic designers are raising their hands in hallelujah, given that the database is well organized and easily available.

Monica Skrzypczak said...

This is such a great resource to have available to everyone! I went on the website and started looking through the films and they have they have the randomest stuff that is just fascinating to to see. For instance, they have women working a coil winding machine in 1904, subways entering a station in 1905, multiple films of soldiers cleaning their rifles, immigrants arriving on a boat, just random really fascinating stuff that are just really good references.
However, as I was exploring, many of the newer things all require you to buy them if you want to use them in a project or film, but that doesn't stop you from just using them as references (they just have the Pond5 watermark on them) if you are drawing or directing or designing. The things that are in the public domain are all black and white for the most part, but that doesn't make them less interesting.