I found this very cool blog post (excerpted below) that speaks to a point that I have been working on recently. As students start developing their own materials in class, they will not be required to really produce everything from scratch. One of the major problems is that if they cannot find suitable material that is available for use under fair use or other copyright regimes (creative commons, royalty free, etc), they will use any materials that they can access on the Internet. Therefore we need to have at hand a wide range of locations where students can access legal material to use in their class projects. That's why this post was so useful, even though it was designed for small business and not specifically for education.
Stock Footage for Free
If you produce projects that include video, one Web tool that you must know about is StockFootageforFree. Here you’ll find both standard definition and high definition NTSC video that’s been shot exclusively for StockFootageforFree, and it’s been made available royalty-free. That means that you can not only download and use these clips for free, you can even use them in commercials.
There are a few legal caveats to be aware of, so be sure to read the end-user license agreement to make sure you’re staying on the up-and-up. For example, you can’t re-sell this stock footage as your own; you can’t use it in trademarks, and they retain ownership of the footage. However once you become a registered member, you can download these clips and use them pretty much any way that you want.
Registration is free, and it’s very easy. Simply provide them with a user name that you’ll use to log into the website, your email address and your first and last name. As a registered member, you have access to clips in a whole bunch of different categories like animals out in the wild; beaches, the waterfront, lakes, yachts, ships; construction and energy. There are some clips dealing with oil refineries and construction.
The site has a special category for high definition clips, so if you only produce high-definition video you would want to limit yourself to that category. Other categories include the holidays, mansions and wealth -- which is really useful if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to convey a feeling of wealth and wealth-building -- sports, time-lapse photography, specific U.S. cities and transportation.
The site covers a lot of different categories and offers a lot of different standard and high-definition stock footage. It’s all available for free to use in your video projects. It's a great resource.
