Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 96: Find Reusable Media Online

Level Easy

Platform Web

Cost Free

You’re designing a new brochure, PowerPoint presentation, website, or flyer, and you need the right image to use with it fast. Put your hands in the air and step away from the cheesy clip art. Thanks to organizations such as Creative Commons, licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License, and the public domain, there are tons of photos, songs, movies, and documents freely available for you to download and republish without fear of the copyright police.

What’s Reusable Media?

Traditionally photographers, artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives copyright their work to restrict usage by others — and charge fees or royalties to do so. But in recent years, a new “free culture” movement arose on the Web, advocating the benefits of proactively permitting others to republish creative work. A new set of licenses that give explicit permission to reuse and republish media (versus restrict it) was born.

NOTE Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons–licensed book, Free Culture, inspired and fully explores the free-culture movement.

If you’re looking for an image to include in your published work — whether it’s a movie, brochure, or e-book — you can’t use copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder. But media licensed for reuse (or that’s in the public domain) is now widely available online — allowed for use in your own projects. This hack covers a few places you can find it.

Six Reusable-Media ...