duck and cover

i've just discovered archive.org, a repository of online educational, instructional and commercial films in the public domain. they're free to preview and download. if you click on the image you'll get to watch one of america's classics, duck and cover, an instructional film that teaches children how to survive nuclear blasts. the last thing i need right now is distraction, but this caught my eye. in my video work lately i've been using a lot of collected footage, as well as my own. these are completely free of copyright snags. wonderful.

in that vein, there is new alternative to copyright that seems to be taking root, especially in europe. it's called creative commons. website is creativecommons.org. the idea is that artists control the way their work is distributed through a variable copyright that creative commons facilitates. for instance, an artist may want to allow non-commercial use of their work. or they may allow anything to be done. in some cases, work is restricted to replication only, no modification or synching with other works without permission of the artist. for my little squirrel video a few posts back i searched for car at the jamendo.com and up came a band named "car crash" that had a song that seemed to work. it creative commons license allowed its use with a movie and so i downloaded it and, voila, soundtrack. i look forward to working with more of this kind of thing because i've been hampered in the past by copyright issues.