Academic Computing Services

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. Our current recommendations:

• iTunes
• Mindawn
• Ruckus

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!