Public Domain Resources For Personal or Commercial Use

What is Public Domain? Works in the public domain are no longer protected by copyright, allowing anyone to freely read, share, and build upon them. These treasures belong to everyone and provide a gateway to understanding our collective history and culture. All works (excepting sound recordings) first published or released in the United States before January 1, 1931, have lost their copyright protection 95 years later and became public domain works, effective January 1, 2026. We are providing below important and useful public domain resources for everyone's benefit. We have included not ony public domain resources but also websites and organizations that provide resources for free or under a limted license even if they are not strictly public domain works. These are third party websites. We are not responsible for their availability or the content they provide. Therefore exercise due diligence when you visit them. Public domain rules differ by country, so always confirm the status of a work before use internationally.

Free Books

Free eBooks | Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy.

Public Domain Library - Free Ebooks: The Public Domain Library is a digital collection of timeless literary treasures, curated to celebrate and share the world’s cultural heritage. Our mission is to make public-domain works accessible to all, fostering a love for literature, history, and art across generations.Our growing collection currently includes 30 carefully selected works, spanning classic literature and historical texts. We are dedicated to expanding this library with titles from around the world, starting with public-domain works in French and other languages.

Open Library: The ultimate goal of the Open Library is to make all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world. While large in scope and ambition, this goal is within our grasp. Achieving it will require the participation of librarians, authors, government officials and technologists.To date, they have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.

Standard Ebooks: Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in their ebooks collection are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks they produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.

Comic Books Plus: The best resource to read and download Golden Age comic books. They also hold a large and growing selection of Silver Age comic books, Comic Strips, Pulp Fiction, Old Time Radio (OTR), Fanzines, a lively and active Forum plus lots more. A historically significant archive that has taken a great many people and thousands of hours to create authentic public domain comic books collection.

Many Books: The site provides an extensive library of books in digital format for free on the Internet. Many of the early eBooks are from the Project Gutenberg archives, which means you will be able to find a lot of classics on the site.

Biblioguides: Find listed books that were published in 1930 or earlier. These books are now in the public domain which means they can be freely reprinted, copied, shared, and adapted. There are some books that were published after 1930 that are also in the public domain and you can find those by using our Advanced Search with the Add Limits options for public domain and publication date.

Digital Public Lirbrary of America: They Library Make millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country available to all in a one-stop discovery experience. Discover 53,541,893 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.

National Archive Catalog: The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) acquires, preserves, and makes available for research the records of enduring value that were created or received by organizations of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government. Records in the custody of the National Archives date from pre-federal times to the present. Most of the records are textual, but they can come in a wide variety of media, such as microfilm, maps and charts, architectural and engineering plans, aerial photographs, motion picture reels, video recordings, sound recordings, computer data sets, or still pictures.

Hathi Trust: Hathitrust.org ia a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 19+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.

Internet Archive: Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more. The Wayback Machine, an initiative of the Internet Archive, is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.

Free Images

PublicdomainPictures.net: Download high-quality public domain images and free stock photos for private and commercial use. No copyright restrictions, no attribution required. People Download high-quality public domain images and free stock photos.

Library of Congress Free to Use and Reuse: More than 100 sets of rights-free images are ready for you to explore and add to your own projects. The topics range widely--from Classic Children’s Books and Disability Awareness to Dragons, Football, Jazz, and Shoes. With 25 to 50 historical photographs, posters, maps, and movies in each set.

Unsplash: They large collection of over 3 million high-resolution images by professional photographers worldwide All supported material is in the public domain, wth a primary focus on photography, their images can used for commercial, non-commercial, and without attribution.

Pexels: They have hundreds of thousands of hand-picked or sourced, royalty-free stock photos and video collections, uploaded by contributors, helping millions of internet users, graphic artists and creator, create beautiful products and quality designs. They can be used for commercial, non-commercial, and without attribution. They do not allow the upload of content created with generative AI to Pexels

Pixabay: Pixabay is a stock photo library owned by the graphic design software company Canva, with a 2.7 million-piece collection of free pictures, separated into categories for photos, illustrations, vector graphics, videos, music, sound effects, and GIFs which can be used for commercial, non-commercial use and without attribution. Content is available for any use without attribution but redistribution of unaltered images is not allowed.

Old Book Illustrations: Their library holds a curated collection of is a search engine and browseable library of engraved illustrations, engravings, and litho prints found in old books and titles from hundreds of famous artists of their time. All works are restored at a high resolution.

Public Domain Vectors: Publicdomainvectors.org, offers copyright-free vector images in popular .eps, .svg, .ai and .cdr formats.To the extent possible under law, uploaders on this site have waived all copyright to their vector images. You are free to edit, distribute and use the images for unlimited commercial purposes without asking permission. Although absolutely not required, they appreciate every link back or mention of their website.

Rawpixel: Rawpixel hosts a diverse collection of free photos with varying license terms, including creative resources, premium imagery, and public domain works. This is not a free service. They retain the copyright to all content. Hence, you cannot trademark rawpixel content or use it for commercial or non-commercial use without caveat. If you want to use their content for prints or other merchandise you must add considerable artistic value to make it your own original design.

Free Art Work

National Gallery of Art: Free open access image downloads are now available directly from the object pages located on this website. More than 60,000 images are available for download, and they will continue to add more as they become available. Images of these works are available free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.

The Met Museum Collection: The collection includes over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks,available for free and unrestricted use. The Met's Open Access Initiative makes images of public-domain artworks and basic data on all accessioned works in its collection available for unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Anyone can download, share, and remix images and data about artworks in The Met collection.

Picryl.com: PICRYL is a public domain search & similarity engine. Picryl is a media source you can use to find images, documents, and references. Find millions of public domain files from hundreds of sources: all in one place. Discover collections of historical moments and public figures. Explore topics and places, travel back in time, and witness historical events. Download high-resolution copyright-free images, order high-quality prints, and merchandise. Use AI neural networks to find and enhance hidden gems to use in the creation of artworks, presentations, HD videos, and large prints. PICRYL is an AI-driven search & similarity engine. PICRYL makes the world's public domain media fun to find and easy to use.

Free Music

Pixabay Music: Offers royalty-free audio tracks and instrumentals, including classical works by Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Mendelssohn. Download public-domain royalty-free audio tracks and instrumentals for your next project.

Open Music Archive: A collaborative archive of out-of-copyright sound recordings, freely distributed for creative use. The Open Music Archive concerns itself with the public domain and creative works which are not owned by any one individual and are held in common by society as a whole.

Musopen: Hosts thousands of royalty-free music files, searchable by composer, instrument, or time period, including high-quality recordings of classical pieces. They increase access to music education by providing free music recordings, sheet music, apps, and educational materials. Their free option limits 5 downloads per day and paid option allows unlimited downloads.

Creazilla: The audio section on Creazilla includes over 130,000 music and sound tracks under a public domain license (CC0). All files are royalty-free and can be used without attribution for editorial, educational, commercial, and personal projects. The site also offers vver 10 million free graphic resources for content creators and designers.

Public Domain Films and Videos

Motion Array: Motion Array is an all-in-one platform where content creators can download unlimited professional video assets, including video templates, presets, motion graphics, AI voiceovers, footage, music, sound effects, graphics, LUTs and stock photos. It also offers video-editing plugins and a library extension for Adobe apps — all in one subscription or under different plans.

Public Domain Films from the National Film Registry: All of the streaming films in the new online collection are in the public domain. They are also available as freely downloadable files with the exception of two titles. Additional films will be added periodically to the website.

Internet Archive Feature Films: Feature films, shorts, silent films and trailers are available for viewing and downloading.

PublicDomainMovie.net: Provides feature films, including classics and silent films, often with detailed descriptions and viewing options. Check their featured films list.

Public Domain Inventions

To find inventions in the public domain, utilize guides and resources that help identify patents that are no longer protected, allowing for free use and innovation. The following resources are helpful.

WIPO Guides: The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) offers comprehensive guides that explain how to determine whether specific inventions are protected by enforceable patents or may be in the public domain. These guides include a three-stage process for searching and analyzing published patent documents, making it easier to identify inventions that can be freely used.

Practical Tools: WIPO also provides practical tools and checklists designed to assist users in navigating the complexities of patent documents. These resources are particularly useful for those in developing countries, helping them access and utilize public domain information effectively.

New Product Development Toolkit: This toolkit offers strategies for using inventions in the public domain to develop new products and services. It includes templates and action plans that guide users through the process of turning public domain inventions into marketable products.