If you know the Internet a little, you can recognize that there are many useful , but also free programs and services. If you have for example no money to buy the office solutions Word or Excel from Microsoft, try OpenOffice.org. Dating plattforms boom also and those of you who only know the services with costs should also try social networks like Gojol.de, where users can communicate with each other for free.Those offers are funded mostly through advertising, appearing on the pages or through donations. The online-encyclopedia Wikipedia e.g is funded exclusivlely through donations.

But not everything that is advertised as free is it really. Fastly the pretended service is pointed out as a subscription that you can dismiss soonest after several months where you have to pay a lot of money for. Here it is necessary to read carefully the terms and conditions to avoid unpleasant surprise.

But what is still not free, apart from illegal file-sharing, are free music- or videodownloads. One positive solution is tht the major music labels moved away from copy-proof. Initially music downloads where protected by using WMA-encoded files.The problem was that thoseprotected files could not be played by all players and this was very irritating. The sales of CDs decline and for this reason the internet was the hope of many music labels. The success of the platform iTunes said, that music have to be sold without limitation. For this reason great music providers such as Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI thought about selling their songs through platforms like Amazon or Napster with the MP3-Standard. This means unrestricted personal copy of downloaded and payed titles. Perhaps music in future will also be free and legal to download. First effords of some companies who tried to finance this by advertising had not have any success. The first steps to free movies made the Blender Foundation, which published Elephant's Dream and Big Buck Bunny for free download. The films were produced by the free rendering program Blender.(picture: paba 06, PIXELIO)