I’ll update this list over time as I add new places, etc., so you might want to bookmark this or just come back here at any time you want to see the new stuff that is being added. I’ll try to link to the original sources of various posts in the future too for a faster reference… However, this main links post is going to be listing as many primary places to get public domain stuff online as I can find. I’ll likely also add a page with a copy of this list at some point in the future for faster reference.
It’ll help to understand the point of this blog and why I’m creating this list if you have a better understanding exactly of what Public Domain is… I’ll edit this later to add a big description here…
http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search is a powerful tool for finding some public domain stuff. Google copied a lot of books from the public domain. Be careful in using that stuff though since Google officially does not want a lot of people using it for commercial work. However, since all they did to the pdf copies of the books is add a little watermark, and since the original source is in the public domain on works created in 1922 and before, we can use google book searches to limit the search to end dates in 1922 – we choose 1922 since works created in and after 1923 have stricter rules on if it is or is not in the public domain…
Before google started the above listed project, the best solution to finding public domain books online was Project Gutenburg. This is a project started a long time ago where contributors manually typed up text copies of books. It is named after the Gutenburg Printing Press, which is believed to be the world’s first Printing Press. It is still an active project, and there’s still lots of new stuff that is added to it regularly.
For video, The Prelinger Archives http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger is a very good source of public domain videos.
I’ll add a lot more description to the above, and add more links here later when I hav more time.
