Legal Alternatives

Why pay thousands of dollars dealing with a copyright lawsuit when there are some legitimate ways to access copyrighted material?

UCSD looks continuously for services that provide legal and affordable alternatives for viewing, listening to, and purchasing copyrighted material. An extensive list of legal alternatives can be found at Educause's website.

Our current recommendations for music:
  • Amazon has very competitive prices for music, and even has anime.
  • iTunes Stores has free songs and TV shows to download every Tuesday
  • Mindawn primarily supports independent artists and small record labels.
  • Pandora Radio is the personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites.
  • Finetune streams tracks from your favorite artists, and lets you create and share playlists.
Our current recommendations for TV shows and movies:
  • Amazon provides a Video on Demand service.
  • Hulu has free TV shows and movies as well, with limited commercials.
  • Crackle, Fancast and Jaman provide streaming TV shows and movies online for free as well.
  • iTunes Store has a movie rental and purchasing store, a service similar to Amazon.
A few free, legal alternatives to commonly used programs

Free alternative to Microsoft Office

Free alternative to Adobe Photoshop

  • Gimp, available for Windows and Mac OS X

Free alternative to AutoCAD

  • BRL-CAT, available for Windows and Mac OS X
Other legal alternatives include:
  • Getting material from the public domain, using sites such as Internet Archive. Government documents, text, and images over 75 years old are in the public domain and are free to use.
  • Using "royalty-free" collections of work, such as CD collections of photographs or clip art.
  • Getting permission or a license for use from the owner of the work before using copyrighted material.
  • Use work you have created yourself!