by Ron Collins | Special to Mostly Water

As internet technologies have developed, corporations have moved towards putting more restrictions on what you can freely download. Partially in reaction, a whole new has been created to give people access to high quality video and music. Legally.

Back in the old days, people tried to provide access to copyrighted material through electronic bulletin boards and then "underground" web sites. It was often difficult to find and these "warez" sites would get shut down regularly and have to move. You'd have to be in the loop and keep up to stay in the loop to get the content you were after. They were often focused on software or games.

With the advent of distributed file sharing software, it became much easier to find and get various kinds of content. For a while, the legal responsibility for content moving from one or many computers to yours, was ambiguous. Legal institutions were having trouble keeping up with the new realities. Intellectual copyright was failing to protect corporate interests.

Downloaded content was crossing international borders even when traveling from Toronto to Montreal, creating a situation where multiple authorities could claim the right to track and prosecute you based on where you lived, where the content originated, where the company who owned the copyright resided and which countries the data traveled through. This required a legal framework to be put into place to cover a jurisdiction for each of these cases. Some countries pursued this more aggressively than others.

The US has its Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), brought in in 1998 to curb copyright violations. Canada, Britain, France and others are currently investigating the possibility of bringing in "three strikes" policies on copyright infringement. It isn't clear how this would be implemented but the idea is to boot you off the internet if you are caught downloading 1's and 0's in an order that someone else "owns".

In response to corporate and government trends, artists and computer programmers recognized that there has been this thing called the "public domain". It was updated for the electronic age and used as a way to share works with others for free. But public domain licensing meant that you lost control of your work. Anyone could use it for any purpose, good or evil. And for profit with no need to recognize the origins.

In stepped the Gnu Public License (GPL) aimed at enabling developers to collaborate on and share "free" software without fear of it being taken over.

Entire operating systems such as Linux have been developed by thousands of contributors under this banner. Part of the goal of these projects has been to replace Windows and Mac OS with something that is more secure and can be shared freely.

For Mac users, OSX is now based on BSD which is developed in the same way. I'm writing this article on a computer that runs a popular Linux variant called Ubuntu which you can download for free and install on pretty much any computer. It has everything I need to do usual computing tasks. All for free.

Using the GPL and other similar licenses as a model, the Creative Commons license was born. It is a series of licenses geared towards allowing artists to share their work with others while not completely giving away control. The author can specify how their work may be used including restrictions on editing or making profit from it.

This framework solves a lot of problems for artists that want to get their work out there and has lead to the creation of some interesting new websites which make use of the plethora of new content being released under the Creative Commons licenses.

A couple of examples I've recently discovered are http://freedocumentaries.org and http://jamendo.com.

FreeDocumentaries has assembled a collection of documentaries that have been released on Google. They put the onus on the artist and Google to deal with licensing and then provide users with an easy interface to find a bunch of related content, a way to preview the trailers and watch the videos. If you are a little tech savvy, you can download the videos and save them to your hard drive or burn them to a CD. In return for this service, they ask you to consider making a donation to the site. Cool enough.

They offer movies by Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, SiCKO, etc), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and hundreds more.

Jamendo takes it one step further. They offer over 60,000 songs and counting. You can listen to, and download anything you like for free. You are encouraged but not required to send a donation which is divided between the site and the artist.

On my Ubuntu laptop, Jamendo is incorporated into my music player (Rythmbox). The entire Jamendo archive is displayed in a searchable way right beside my personal music collection.

If you are on Windows or Mac, you can go to the website and get the tunes. It appears there is a Jamendo stand alone player for Windows but I haven't tested it and it isn't clear how well developed it is. If anyone knows about Windows Media Player or Mac's iTune integration with Jamendo, I'd like to hear from you.

You can also get a Jamendo Google Gadget for your Windows desktop but it requires installing Google Desktop which gives Google a lot of access to your computer. That just seems like a bad idea.