RogerEvansOnline.com

Remember when “everybody” was swapping those old floppy disks with pirated copies of the WordPerfect program on them, while the profits of WordPerfect every day went further through the roof (which they continued to do until hit by the steamroller that was Microsoft)? That was an early digital example of the permeability of the wall between giving things away and making a profit indirectly, through ubiquity, that has been a leading characteristic of the new-media revolution — one that such outfits as the Electronic Frontier Foundation were quickly founded to preserve and encourage. But the Wild West air behind that foundation’s name is no longer the only one breathed by the culture of free-use on the internet. Now comes a substantive guide to Public Domain and Creative Commons: A Guide to Works You Can Use Freely, including musical scores of works not under copyright. I use such resources every single day and now find some difficulty in imagining how it felt not to have them.

Tip of the hat for link to this resource: Michael Ochs