Everyday, more and more young people download contents from the internet. Most of us do it even though we think it is crime. But the truth is content downloading is not forbiden. It all depends on what you download. For those who like free access to information and culture, here’s an invitation to discover the wonderful world of Creative Commons Licenses.
Created in December 2002 by Lawrence Lessig, a university teacher at Harvard, these licenses allow the author of every single work to share it freely without restrictions, acording to his/her own will. This means that if you download a Creative Commons licensed item, such as a music, a picture, a text or even a movie, you’re not commiting a crime, you’re just enjoying the greatest part of Internet: freedom. Yes, you will have to follow some rules such as attribution (you’re using something that was created by another person, so it is better that you tell that to other people), but if you do that, not only you have the right of download, you also get the right of sharing that work with who ever you like.
Enough talking for now. Let’s go to what matters, you are probably asking yourself “So, how do I find those free items?”. Well, you can always search on Creative Commons website, but there are some websites that will probably be more insteresting that that.
If you like photos, I’m pretty sure that you already know Flickr. It is a social network based on the possibility of sharing pictures. And most of the pictures are licensed by Creative Commons.
If you’re music geek, welcome to Jamendo, a social network of free music distributed on the internet (aka netaudio). The Luxembourg based website is available in several different languages (such as english, french, spanish, german, italian, polish and portuguese) and by the time this article was written it had 268.350 tracks of every music gender available for you to listen and download in a completely legal and free way. You won’t find Lady Gaga there, but artists like Kanye West, Beastie Boys, Moby or Massive Attack have released CC licensed tracks – why don’t you check RCRD LBL website out and see it for yourself?
If you’re into reading, there’s something for you as well. Despite its commercial oriented policy, Google Books is a good place for you to find CC licensed books. Books that you’re obviously allowed to save and keep in your hard drive.
If you were still wondering about the movies, let’s get this straight: most of CC licensed movies are short-lenght videos that you can easily find on YouTube for instance. But there are also full-lenght movies and documentaries available. You can check out the list here.
