Excellent find by Stephen Grant… You can now experience the battle lines of World War I in Second Life, thanks to The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University. WWI shocked the Western world with its landscape-changing warfare and high tech carnage. Remembrances of “The Great War” live on in some remarkable poetry and literature. And now Second Life too. Find more information on this project here.

Last year, Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, gave what was supposed to be his last talk on the modern copyright regime that once benefited creativity but now stifles it and brings big bucks to corporations. But, at EDUCAUSE last week, he came back as the keynote speaker and returned to these still-burning issues once again. Lessig has posted his artfully presented talk online, and you can now watch it above.

PS Once you start the video, it will take a little while for you to see anything.

Courtesy of Simon Critchley, who teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research…

Jonathan Lethem, the writer behind Motherless Brooklyn (one of my faves) and Fortress of Solitude, has a new book out, Chronic City. Above, he talks about the surreal quality of his work, the future of digital books, and the personal guidelines that determine what he writes, and won’t write. Within this last point, you will find a good lesson for all of us. Find your unique talent, dedicate yourself to it, avoid the work commonly done by others, and you can achieve something notable and worthwhile.

Man, I love plutocrat humor in the morning…

(You can also watch the clip here)

Where to watch free movies on the web? Here’s a list that will get you started. We’ve listed 30 sites that feature a wide range of films. Classics, international, film noir, documentaries, indies — they’re all here, waiting to be watched.

General Films/Movies

Internet Archive – Feature Films: When you’re looking for free movies online, the Internet Archive should be your first stop. It features large collections of comedies, film noir and sci-fi/horror flix. You will also find some foreign films here, along with important classic films, including Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, John Huston’s Beat the Devil, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and The Kid with Charlie Chaplin. You can access the Archive’s full movie library here.

Australian Screen Archive: The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasure chest of down-under video 100 years in the making. Thanks Peter for that tip.

Babelgum Films: Babelgum’s goal is to act as an international ‘glue’, bringing a huge range of professional and semi-professional films to a global audience – like a modern-day Tower of Babel. They’re also making an effort to get their content to smartphones. They have an iPhone app now and apps for other phones on the horizon. Get more detail on the mobile apps here.

BestOnlineDocumentaries: As one reader previously told us, “This site is a bit out of date and some of the links are broken, but it’s still a great compilation of online documentaries.” For more documentaries, you should also see Snagfilms mentioned below.

Classic Cinema Online: This site nicely pulls together hundreds of classic films, ranging from Action to Westerns and even old cinema shorts and news reels. A good tip from Lifehacker.

Crackle.com: If you’re looking for mainstream movies, here you go. This is Sony’s online movie play. You get free films here. But my guess is that there’s some geo-blocking that comes with this. Can anyone verify? (Note: one of our readers has also suggested the UK-based Blinkbox, which seems to offer another platform for more mainstream films.)

Creative Commons: The folks who gave us the Creative Commons license host a wiki where you can find a good number of freely available films. Handy and worth keeping an eye on. I’d also suggest keeping tabs on CC’s Video blog.

Daily Motion Movies: This YouTube-style video site features a section that offers short films in HD. The collection is small, and you won’t find well known films here. But some movies get decent reviews. This looks to be part of a beta project that could expand.

Europa Film Treasures: Thanks to Europa Film Treasures, you can spend hours looking back through an archive of European film. Theses films range from “comedy to science fiction, from westerns to animation, from erotic to ethnological movies.” Highly recommended by our readers.

Documentary Film Network: This site has been archiving documentaries for the past 4 years and serving them free of charge. Among the 181 films, you can find some of the Nixon-Frost interviews and a Che Guevara Biography.

Fancast: This Comcast-owned site features a long list of free movies. Some notable films include Laurence Olivier and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, Johnny Depp in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Gary Cooper in The Pride of the Yankees, Robert DeNiro in Ronin, and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

Film Annex: This site has one of the largest selections of online films for you to watch or download. See films from independent filmmakers and directors from all over the world, and download or stream to your PC, laptop or iPhone. The films are ad-supported. If you click here, you can watch Charlie Chaplin’s 1918 film, Shoulder Arms.

FMO: FreeMoviesOnline features a large selection of public domain films. Here, you’ll find films featuring John Wayne (Paradise Canyon) , Humphrey Bogart (Beat the Devil), Cary Grant (The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss), Fred Astaire (Royal Wedding) and many others.

Free Documentaries Online: The name says it all.

Free Documentaries.Org: Specializes in showing provocative documentaries for free…

Google Video: For some time now, major classics have appeared on Google Video. Take for example: the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Sergei Eisenstein’s 1918 film Alexander Nevsky, Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw (1943), Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), Night of the Living Dead (1968), 1984 (based on the Orwell novel) and three films by the great Frank Capra — It Happened One Night (with Clark Gable), It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (both with Jimmy Stewart).

Hulu: Unfortunately Hulu limits its programming to a US audience  (a policy that really needs to change), but it’s the 800 pound gorilla in the US, and there are some decent films here (see some picks here), so I’m grudgingly listing it. Sorry in advance Stephen…

IMDB: This is perhaps a little redundant, but the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) also hosts some free online films (as well as TV shows) on its site. From what I can tell, it’s done in partnership with Hulu. But this collection has the advantage of pointing you to some decent films. Click here and scroll down. You can also find another re-packager of Hulu flix over at Veoh.com.

Jaman: Jaman is mainly a pay-per-download site that focuses on indie-style films, but they do host some free movies. Even though they have a page devoted to their free films, it’s actually not that easy to find the freebies. You have to fish around a little.

Legal Torrents: Pretty much what the name says. Legaltorrents.com hosts high quality open-licensed (Creative Commons) digital media and art. This link takes you to their movie section.

NFB.ca: NFB.ca is a web site where you can watch films produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It offers access to 100s of documentaries, animated films and trailers. You can also access this collection via a free iPhone app. (PS You should also check out our own free iPhone app, which will let you download free audio books, free courses, free language lessons, and other types of intelligent media.)

OVGuide: If you’re looking for more free films, you should pay this site a visit. OVGuide is an up-to-date guide to online video, including TV shows, movies, and video games. It offers another way to find free movies online.

PBS Video: PBS hosts online a new film based on Michael Pollan’s bestseller, Botany of Desire. Other PBS productions are also housed here.

QuickSilverScreen: This site essentially puts torrents online and lets you watch films posted by other users, including many new films. It’s hard to believe that this site is entirely kosher, but it’s very popular (one of the top 3,000 sites on the web) and hardly a closely held secret.

Sling.com: This collection contains some dreck, but also some decent documentaries and classic films. So it gets on the list.

SnagFilms: SnagFilms “finds the world’s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers, and makes them available to a wide audience.” You can watch full-length documentary films for free. Currently includes over 550 films. And, as one reader notes, “The best part … is you can give back to the charitable foundations behind each one of the documentaries.” Among other films, you can find Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Naomi Wolf’s The End of America here.

Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive: This online catalog “provides access to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive. The Archive serves as a comprehensive informational and archival resource worldwide for moving image materials pertaining to the Holocaust and related aspects of World War II. ”

The Auteurs.com: Though this site typically offers arts films on a pay-per-view basis, it does feature a series of free films. Each month, a free film is featured (see example here). The site also hosts free international films restored by Martin Scorsese’s Word Cinema Foundation, mentioned right below. And you can find another set of free films here.

Video on Demand at Amazon.com: Ok, it’s not the most enriching collection of films. But if you’re looking for something light…

World Cinema Foundation: The WCF, created by Martin Scorsese in 2007, has restored a series of classic international films. You can watch them for free online.

YouTube Movies: YouTube hosts a series of full-length movies. Right now, some of the free movies include: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), His Girl Friday with Cary Grant, A Farewell to Arms with Gary Cooper, Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film, Home.  There are likely some geo-restrictions here.

YouTube Screening Room: The Screening Room presents high quality, short independent films to YouTube users and promises to roll out four new films every two weeks. The collection includes some Academy-Award winners and other quality films. More info here.

For more Free Culture, see our other major collections:

Free Courses Online

Free Audio Books

Free Language Lessons

Intelligent Video: The Top Cultural & Educational Video Sites

Not long before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Charlie Rose and discussed the troubled state of scientific knowledge in America, and how it threatens our democracy. Before Richard Dawkins came along, Sagan was already out there, making the case for scientific thinking, arguing that it let us make progress and keeps our republic vital. (Whether our republic actually remains vital at this point, it’s certainly hard to say.) We need more figures like Sagan, and we particularly need the American university system to care more about public engagement — an area where it depressingly comes up short. But we’ll talk more about that at some other point. Part 1 is above. Click for Part 2 and Part 3.

Related Content:

Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan Remixed

This comes to us courtesy of TED Talks. Here, Itay Talgam, an Israeli conductor, talks about the art of leading an orchestra and shows the styles of six great 20th-century conductors. Ultimately, there are some general lessons here. Lessons about leadership. Give it a few minutes, and it gets going. Meanwhile, on a related note, you might want to check out Yale’s new open course, Listening to Music, which uses classical musical to make sense of music more generally. Thanks Vickie for the great find.