Introduction

This manual is a collection of media resources you may find helpful when creating an audio, video, print, or digital work.

Many of the sites include assets that are royalty free, which means you can use or modify them without attribution or worrying about getting into legal trouble.

If you are plan to use copyrighted works in your project, be sure to consult the section below, regarding copyright and fair use.

What About Copyrighted Material?

Using other people's creative work can be tricky. Copyright is a complex subject, and if you plan to use any copyrighted or otherwise non-royalty-free media assets, you will usually need to at the very least give attribution or cite where the work came from.

Most academic use of copyrighted material is covered by something called fair use, which means that works can be used in academic work without running into issues with the law as long as only a certain amount is used.

This article from Stanford goes into a good amount of detail about fair use of copyrighted material in the context of academic work:

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

Cheat Sheet

Here is a quick cheat sheet of what can be used for different types of work and still be considered fair use:

Text	Up to 1000 words, but not more than 10% of the book or article
Poems	Up to 250 words or the entire poem if less than 250 words No more than 3 poems by the same author No more than 5 poems in a collection of poetry
Photographs or Drawings	Up to 5 graphics or photographs by the same person No more than 15 images from a collection Images cannot be changed.
Video	Up to 3 minutes but no more than 10% of the entire video The video clip cannot be changed.
Music	Up to 30 seconds but no more than 10% of sheet music Up to 30 seconds but no more than 10% of recording The music cannot be changed in any major way.
Citations	Remember to cite your sources. Multimedia presentation must include a statement indicating fair use for educational purposes. Copyright information must be included in bibliography.

Credit: https://www.rock.k12.nc.us/domain/1103

Music

YouTube Audio Library

https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/

Free music and sound effects available for download and use in your own project.

Sampleswap.org

https://sampleswap.org

Loops, samples, sound effects and more. Great for musicians looking to work with new material, or for background sounds for audio or video producers.

Full tracks of royalty-free music are available as well: https://sampleswap.org/mp3/creative-commons/free-music.php

Requires you to create an account and log in to download, which is free.

Bandcamp Creative Commons tracks

https://bandcamp.com/tag/creative-commons

Bandcamp is a site where musicians can upload, share and sell their music. It has a specific category/tag for music that uses a Creative Commons license, which gives different levels of permission for use of copyrighted material.

Sound Effects

Freesound

https://freesound.org/

A large collection of free user-uploaded sounds. Requires users to create a free account to download.

Zapsplat

https://www.zapsplat.com

Another great collection of royalty-free sounds.

Sound Bible

http://soundbible.com/

Another collection of sound effects for use in audio and video projects.

Makerbook

http://makerbook.net/

Makerbook curates lists of sites with free assets for use in for all sorts of media projects - photography and vector images, video, audio, and more.

Photos and Graphics

Searching For Images and Copyright Laws

When searching for images online, many of the tools we use (such as Google Images) will return the most relevant results for our search - including copyrighted or unlicensed images. Copyrighted images are protected under law, which means that if you publish copyrighted images - even in something like a post on a personal blog - the owner of the copyright can sue you. There is even something of a cottage industry around suing people who infringe on copyrighted images - even if they do so unknowingly because they found them by searching online.

For a more in-depth explanation of copyright and usage of images available online, check out this article that goes into more details and real-world situations around copyright.

Certain exceptions to copyright law exist that grant limited use of a copyrighted work if that usage benefits the public, known as fair use. Fair use applies to things like news reporting, criticism/commentary, and using copyrighted works for educational purpose. Most of the time if you are using assignments for assignments for class that could be argued as fair use, but it is still important to make sure to your due diligence in finding and using pictures online.

Some of the ways to avoid this are to limit your search to licensed images only, or to use search tools that specifically index royalty-free assets.

Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Wikimedia is a user-generated collection of open source, royalty-free, and otherwise okay-to-use media assets. As the name suggests, it is basically like Wikipedia but for media resources.

Creative Commons Search

https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org

Creative Commons (CC) is a type of licensing that allows people to use or re-use images that are licensed under it. There are a few different varieties of CC that can apply to a resource.

Google Image Search Usage Rights

https://images.google.com/

Screenshot showing the Usage Rights options in the Google Image Search interface

When using Google Image Search to find images, you can limit your results to only include items that fit particular licenses for re-use. To do this, click the Tools menu below the search bar and choose the Usage Rights option.

This will help you avoid images that are clearly not licensed for public use. Because it relies on automated search algorithms and user reports to determine the licensing for a given image, it is not a foolproof way to avoid copyright infringment - but it's definitely better than the default Google Image search, and is a good place to start!