MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for software applications to look up audio CD information on the Internet. MusicBrainz has expanded its goals to reach beyond a CD metadata storehouse to become a structured online database for music.
Waveform Audio File Format is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 by IBM and Microsoft. It is the main format used on Microsoft Windows systems for uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format.
FLAC is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content. They encourage creators to create such content by using permissive and share-alike licensing, like that used on Wikipedia.
A video search engine is a web-based search engine which crawls the web for video content. Some video search engines parse externally hosted content while others allow content to be uploaded and hosted on their own servers. Some engines also allow users to search by video format type and by length of the clip. The video search results are usually accompanied by a thumbnail view of the video.
A tag editor is an app that can add, edit, or remove embedded metadata on multimedia file formats. Content creators, such as musicians, photographers, podcasters, and video producers, may need to properly label and manage their creations, adding such details as title, creator, date of creation, and copyright notice.
Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.
An audio search engine is a web-based search engine which crawls the web for audio content. The information can consist of web pages, images, audio files, or another type of document. Various techniques exist for research on these engines.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limitations on usage, modification and distribution. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, was a web-based publication of educational material from a number of Tufts University courses, providing open sharing of free, searchable, high-quality course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the global community. The Tufts OCW initiative encouraged the publication and free exchange of course materials on the World Wide Web. First launched in June 2005, Tufts OCW provided materials with strong representation from Tufts' health sciences schools, some of which were equivalent to textbooks in depth. All materials on the Tufts OCW site were accessible and free of charge. As Tufts OCW is not a distance learning program, no registration, applications, prerequisites, or fees are required and no credit is granted. Tufts ended funding for its Open Courseware initiative in 2014, and content on the Tufts OCW web site was removed on June 30, 2018.
Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines.
A Rights Expression Language or REL is a machine-processable language used to express intellectual property rights and other terms and conditions for use over content. RELs can be used as standalone expressions or within a DRM system.
Indaba Music is a web-based company that provides a music collaboration environment for musicians: "a place to build a profile, promote their tunes and collaborate with other musicians" as well as enter opportunities like remixing and songwriting contests with popular artists.
The Definition of Free Cultural Works evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses.
Open Game Art is a media repository intended for use with free and open source software video game projects, offering open content assets.
edu-sharing is an open-source e-learning integration solution. The core of the system is a repository for the cooperative creation, management, and usage of objects such as files, links, instances of integrated tools and courses of connected learning management systems such as Moodle. Through open interfaces, different edu-sharing repositories can be connected to each other as well as to diverse repositories or repository networks. This enables the exchange of content and educational know-how across the borders of systems and organizations and between disparate learning management systems and other e-learning tools connected to such repositories.
Puddletag is a graphical audio file metadata editor ("tagger") for Unix-like operating systems.
Before data.europa.eu, the EU Open Data Portal was the point of access to public data published by the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies. On April 21, 2021 it was consolidated to the data.europa.eu portal, together with the European Data Portal: a similar initiative aimed at the EU Member States.
