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Where to find show prep material you're actually allowed to use
Public domain and openly licensed sources for radio show prep — Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress, NASA, NOAA, the Smithsonian — and what each license allows.
There’s a difference between material you can find and material you can use, and the gap between them is where station websites get takedown notices.
This is a working list of places where the answer to “can I use this?” is already yes, plus the part most lists skip: what each license actually permits once you get past the download button.
First, the two rules that cover most of it
Facts are free. Sentences aren’t. Copyright protects expression, not information. That a study found X, that a court ruled Y, that a thing happened in 1958 — nobody owns those. The paragraph a reporter wrote about it’s theirs. Read widely, then write it in your own words. That isn’t a loophole, it’s how the whole news business has always worked.
Images and audio are different from facts, and much stricter. A photo is protected expression. “It was on Google Images” isn’t a license, and the $800-and-a-stern-letter education is one a lot of small stations have already paid for. Everything below is a source where the license is explicit.
Images
Wikimedia Commons — commons.wikimedia.org
The big one. Roughly a hundred million freely licensed media files, and every single one has its license stated on the file page.
What to watch: “on Commons” doesn’t mean “public domain”. Files are a mix of public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Check the box on the file page.
- Public domain / CC0 — do anything, no attribution required (though it’s good manners).
- CC BY — free to use, including commercially, if you credit the creator as they ask.
- CC BY-SA — same, but anything you build that incorporates it has to carry the same license. Fine for a website post; think before putting it in a station logo.
Practical tip: click through to the file page rather than saving the thumbnail. The page has the license, the attribution string, and usually a much larger original.
Openverse — openverse.org
Searches Commons, Flickr’s open-licensed pool and a few dozen other libraries in one place, filtered by license. It generates the attribution line for you, which removes the most common reason people skip attribution.
The Library of Congress — loc.gov/free-to-use
An enormous American photographic and print archive, with a curated “free to use and reuse” section where the rights status is already settled. Extraordinary for anything historical, and unbeatable for local-history segments if your town is in there — a surprising number are.
NASA — images.nasa.gov
Generally not copyrighted and usable without permission, including commercially. The exception is the NASA logos and insignia, which are protected and shouldn’t go on your merch. Also note that NASA content sometimes includes images from partner agencies with their own terms — the caption will say.
Smithsonian Open Access — si.edu/openaccess
Several million CC0 items. Objects, artwork, specimens, historical photographs. CC0 means genuinely no strings.
NOAA and the National Weather Service — noaa.gov
Weather imagery, satellite loops, storm photography, climate data. As US federal works these are generally in the public domain, which makes NWS the correct source for severe weather graphics on your website — and it’s the authoritative one anyway.
Why the federal ones work
Under 17 U.S.C. § 105, works created by US federal government employees as part of their official duties aren’t eligible for copyright. That’s why NASA, NOAA, the Library of Congress, the CDC, the National Park Service and the census are all usable.
Three caveats that catch people:
- It applies to federal, not state or local. Your state DOT’s photos and your city’s website aren’t automatically free.
- It applies to employees, not contractors. An agency can hold copyright in work it commissioned.
- Agencies host third-party material too. If a federal page credits an outside photographer, that photo is that photographer’s.
Audio and music
Be more careful here than anywhere else. You work in a licensed building — your station’s ASCAP/BMI/SESAC/GMR blanket covers broadcast performance of music, and it does not automatically cover a podcast, a YouTube video, or the audio on your website. Those are different rights and often a different conversation.
- Free Music Archive (freemusicarchive.org) and ccMixter (ccmixter.org) — openly licensed music, license stated per track. Check whether commercial use is permitted; a lot of it’s CC BY-NC, and a commercial radio station is commercial use.
- Internet Archive (archive.org) — vast, and mixed. Some genuinely public domain, some uploaded by people with no right to upload it. Verify rather than assume.
- Librivox (librivox.org) — public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers, released into the public domain. Useful for historical readings and dramatic excerpts.
- Sound effects: Freesound (freesound.org) has a large CC-licensed library, filterable by license. The BBC also publishes a large sound effects library for personal, educational and research use — read their terms before putting one in a commercial spot.
Text, facts and reference
- Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) — 70,000+ public domain books. Everything published in the US before 1930 is now in the public domain, and a year’s worth rolls in every January.
- Wikipedia — a superb index and a poor source. Use it to find the citations at the bottom of the article, then read those. Never read a Wikipedia sentence on the air as fact without doing that.
- Wikisource (wikisource.org) — public domain documents, speeches and primary texts, transcribed.
- US Census (data.census.gov) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov) — the correct home of local statistics. “The median age in this county is 38.4” is a genuinely good radio line, it’s free, and nobody else in your market bothers to look it up.
- Your local government. City council agendas, county sheriff logs, school board minutes, planning applications. All public records, all boring to read, all full of stories nobody else has. This is the single most underused source in small-market radio.
- Court records. Public in most jurisdictions. Reporting the contents of a public filing is on solid ground — describing it accurately is the whole job.
Attribution, done in ten seconds
For a CC BY image, the format everyone accepts is:
“Title” by Creator, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Link the title to the source page and the license name to the license. Openverse writes this line for you. Keep it in the caption or an image credit line — not buried on a separate credits page.
On air, attribution is a courtesy rather than a legal requirement for facts, but naming the outlet is good radio anyway: “The Associated Press is reporting” is more credible than “apparently”.
Two habits worth building
Screenshot the license, not just the file. Six months later, when someone asks where a photo came from, the file on your desktop tells you nothing. A folder with the source URL and the license in the filename settles it in seconds.
When in doubt, ask. Small photographers and local historical societies say yes far more often than people expect, especially to a radio station that offers a mention. An email costs nothing; a license dispute costs a lot.
What this doesn’t solve
Every source above tells you what you’re permitted to use. None of them tells you whether a thing is true — that’s a separate job, and it’s the one that gets read out loud with your name attached.
For facts that matter, the standard is two independent reputable sources, and the check should take seconds rather than derailing your prep. That’s precisely the problem ShowPrepPro is built around: every factual item arrives with two dated citations already attached, so the verification is done before you sit down. The list above is for when you’re building something yourself.