Friday, April 10, 2009
Free Music Archive
Free Music Archive offers free downloads under Creative Commons and other licenses. To find music in the Free Music Archive, do a music search or browse by curator or genre.
"The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is being directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet.
Every mp3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by outdated copyright law. Are you a podcaster looking for pod-safe audio? A radio or video producer searching for instrumental bed music that won't put your audience to sleep? A remix artist looking for pre-cleared samples? Or are you simply looking for some new sounds to add to your next playlist? The Free Music Archive is a resource for all that and more, and unlike other websites, all of the audio has been hand-picked by established audio curators." For more information, visit: http://freemusicarchive.org/about/
Do visit the track page to discover what you can and cannot do with each track.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Banned Books Week: Sept 27 - Oct 4
Celebrate the freedom to read! Please don't take this democratic freedom for granted. Banned Books Week celebrates the freedom to choose and express one's opinion. It focuses attention on the importance of making available a wide range of viewpoints to all who wish to read them. Observed during the last week of September each year since 1982, this is the 27th anniversary of BBW.
Each year, people ask libraries to remove books that offend them. Intellectual freedom, however, requires that multiple viewpoints be represented in libraries. For more information about challenged books, see the Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2007, Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century (2000-2005), and Most Challenged Books of 2007-2008 (pdf brochure).
“Intellectual Freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored. Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas.” Intellectual Freedom and Censorship Q&A
Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., in Texas v. Johnson, said: “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”