Open Access Audiovisual Materials
Compiled here are a list of resources where you can find A/V materials in the public domain.
Video
Archive.org – Feature Film Library
Archive.org – FedFlix
Films from the United States Government.
Archive.org – Moving Image Library
This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.
Archive.org – Prelinger Archives
An immense collection of ephemeral films, often home movies, shot on film in the US, throughout the 20th century. Founded by Rick Prelinger with a goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven’t been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions.
Archive.org – Stock Footage Library
A collection of stock footage clips submitted by Internet Archive users. These clips are designed to be used in other videos.
CDC (USA) B-Roll Footage
CDC b-roll is produced by the United States Government and is in the public domain. This means that the footage is meant for public use and is not subject to copyright law protections. Permission is not required for use of public domain items. However, they do ask that you cite CDC as the source.
Critical Commons
Allows sharing & embedding, but not downloading. Some content may be under copyright.
DVIDS – NASA Media Archive
DVIDS is a great resource for media files. Their mission is to provide an accurate, reliable source for media organizations to access U.S. service members and commanders deployed in support of military operations worldwide.
Japanese Animated Film Classics
From the National Film archive of Japan. You may need to contact the archives for permission to use these films for scholarly projects.
Library of Congress – Moving Picture Resource Center
Public Domain Review: Video Search
Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
Science Cinema
Scientific videos featuring leading-edge research from the U.S. Department of Energy. Using innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology, ScienceCinema allows users to search for specific words and phrases spoken within video files.
United States National Park Service B Roll Archives
University of Illinois – Center for Black Music Research
Includes oral histories and audio-visual collections
Vimeo – Creative Commons Library
Wikimedia Commons: Free Video Resources
Sound
99Sounds offers excellent, themed “boutique” sound libraries (like cinematic textures or field recordings) that are completely free.
All music within Audionauti is composed and produced by Jason Shaw. This music is royalty-free, completely free for you to download and use (even for commercial purposes) as long as you provide credit [https://audionautix.com/creative-commons-music].
The BBC has made over 33,000 sound effects available for free for personal, educational, or research purposes. It’s an incredible resource — historical and practical.
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization that offers free licenses to content owners in order to increase public access to, and use of, a wide range of works, extending and enhancing creative possibilities. The organization is “dedicated to building a globally accessible public commons of knowledge and culture,” making it easier “for people to share their creative and academic work, as well as to access and build upon the work of others.” When using CC-licensed content, review the terms of use for the CC license and determine if further permission and/or any fee is required.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) maximizes access to America’s shared history, culture, and knowledge in collaboration with a vast network of libraries and cultural organizations. The copyright status of items in DPLA varies. DPLA links to a wide variety of different materials: many are in the public domain, while others are under rights restrictions but nonetheless publicly viewable. For individual rights information about an item, please check the “Rights” field in the item’s catalog record (i.e., metadata), or follow the link to the digital object on the content provider’s website for more information.
Europeana provides users with digital access to millions of cultural heritage items from over 4,000 institutions across Europe (namely European galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). The site allows users to discover images, books, music, videos, and newspaper sources across subject areas such as art and art history, world history and civilization, archaeology, fashion, science, sports and athletics, and much more.
Free Music Archive (FMA) offers free access to open licensed, original music by independent artists around the world. Many artists accept Creative Commons attribution for licensing.
“FreePD.com – 100% Free Music – Free for Commercial Use, Free Of Royalties, Free Of Attribution, Creative Commons 0
* It is ‘copyright free’ to the extent that the law allows.”
Music, clips, and sound effects.
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offering an ever-growing digital library of millions of free books, movies, software, sound recordings, websites, and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
LibGuides [various URLs]
A lot of academic (that is, college / university) libraries use a tool called “LibGuides” to create resource guides and research support pages for their user communities. Typing a search string into Google such as (copyright-free music OR music free to use without permission) AND LibGuide, for example, will likely retrieve several useful guides and lists from various university library systems. Here are a few specific examples:
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, films and videos, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, music scores, maps, and manuscripts in its collections. The Library preserves and provides access to a rich, diverse and enduring source of knowledge to inform, inspire, and engage users in their intellectual and creative endeavors. Pay close attention to usage rights and permissions on this site.
975+ Creative Commons no copyright music. Download Creative Commons royalty-free audio tracks and instrumentals for your next project.
The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. With an emphasis on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, the journal and project’s main focus is on works in the public domain — that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction.
Every year for the Game Developers Conference, Sonniss releases massive “archive” bundles of professional-grade sound effects (SFX) for free. They are legally cleared for commercial use and are a goldmine for composers, sound artists, and others.
Soundly, an alternative to Soundminer, is a cloud-based sound effects search and retrieval program. It can be used in much the same way as Soundminer. Soundly has kindly given us access to their Pro Library. It can also be used to search for and retrieve sounds from Freesound.
Submit a ticket using your CalArts email address to get the promo code to use Soundly during the Spring 2026 semester. There are a limited number of codes. Please do not share the code you are sent; doing so will deactivate your account.
Wikimedia Commons offers a collection of over 100 million freely usable media files on a platform to which anyone can contribute.