This is the category where public-domain material concentrates, which makes it the first place to look if your constraint is licensing rather than subject matter.
Cultural and archival institutions have been releasing digitised collections under public-domain or clearly permissive terms for years, often with better metadata than machine-learning datasets manage. If you need text or images whose provenance you can actually defend — for a commercial generative model, or for a domain where rights questions are live — this is where to start, and the licence column below is cleaner than most, though not every label clears the content: Comic 9K and Movie Posters 100K carry uploaders' licences on commercial artwork, and Famous Iconic Women and Reddit Memes carry CC0 tags on images collected from the web.
The trade-off is distribution rather than quality. Historical material is historical: older orthography, dated terminology, and the biases of the period in which it was produced, which will appear in a model trained on it. And a corpus of nineteenth-century books is not a substitute for contemporary prose if your application processes the latter. Useful, well-licensed, and worth checking against your actual inference distribution before you commit.
| Dataset | Modality | Size | Licence | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UW Madison Courses | Text | 9,000 courses | CC0 | Analysing grade and performance trends |
| OpenAccess - The Met Collection | Image | 470,000 works | CC0 | Computer vision for classification |
| IIT Admissions Dataset | Tabular | 200,000 records | CC0 | Admissions trends and academic preferences |
| Steam Games Dataset | Text | 124,000 entries | MIT | Analysing trends and statistics |
| New Yorker Caption Contest | Multimodal | 10,900 instances | CC BY 4.0 | Understand multimodal humour |
| Art Portraits | Image | 10,600 images | CC0 | GANs for artistic image generation |
| Letterbox Movie Classification Dataset | Text | 10,002 movies | CC0 | Content or popularity based film recommendation |
| Gutenberg Dataset | Text | Several tens of thousands of books | Public domain | Text generation or completion |
| Comic 9K | Image | 238,000 images | Unclear — see below | Vision models specialised in comic books |
| Movie Posters 100K ControlNet | Image | 10,000 images | Unclear — see below | Layout-to-image generation |
| 7K Books with Metadata | Text | 6,542 rows | Unclear — see below | Content-based book recommendation engine |
| Netflix Movies and TV Shows 2021 | Tabular | 5,897 rows | Unclear — see below | Recommendation systems |
| field | line 263 | line 204 |
|---|---|---|
| Object Number | 35.46a, b | 69.175 |
| Is Public Domain | True | True |
| Object Name | Badge | Armchair |
| Title | Badge of the Cincinnati Medal | Armchair |
| Artist Role | Designer | Maker |
| Artist Display Name | Pierre Charles L'Enfant | Duncan Phyfe |
| Artist Wikidata URL | https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q264764 | https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3041258 |
| Object Date | ca. 1783 | ca. 1835 |
| Medium | Gold | Rosewood |
| City | Paris | New York |
| Country | France | United States |
UW Madison Courses
- Size
- Over 9,000 courses, 200,000 sections, 3 million grades, SQL files and PDF snippets
- Licence
- CC0: Public Domain
Records of over 9,000 University of Wisconsin-Madison courses, 200,000 sections and 3 million grades, covering every semester since 2006, supplied as SQL files with PDF snippets, extracted from official reports.
Analysing grade and performance trends in higher education, developing NLP to extract educational information, and building course planning or academic prediction tools.
Source: innovatiana.com
OpenAccess - The Met Collection
- Size
- 470,000+ works, tabular metadata (CSV/Parquet); images released separately
- Licence
- CC0 1.0
Metadata for over 470,000 Metropolitan Museum of Art works in CSV and Parquet, released under CC0. Images are not part of the dataset: the Met releases images of public-domain works separately under CC0, while images of works still in copyright are not openly licensed, so filter on the public-domain flag before using any image.
Training computer vision for classification, image search or artistic OCR once paired with the Met's separately released public-domain images, building search and cultural applications on the catalogue metadata, and enriching art history knowledge bases.
Source: innovatiana.com
IIT Admissions Dataset
- Size
- Approximately 200,000 CSV tabular records with academic, financial, and demographic fields
- Licence
- CC0: Public Domain
Roughly 200,000 tabular CSV records on students who applied to the Indian Institutes of Technology, with academic, financial and demographic fields covering field of study, specialisation, tuition fees and discounts.
Studying admissions trends and academic preferences, analysing financial factors influencing admission, and modelling or predicting admission chances by profile.
Source: innovatiana.com
Steam Games Dataset
- Size
- About 124,000 entries in Parquet format (83,560 when first catalogued)
- Licence
- MIT
About 124,000 Parquet entries of metadata on PC games published on Steam, gathered from the Steam API and Steam Spy with DLC and extra content excluded.
Analysing trends and statistics in the video game industry, developing game recommendation systems, and studying popularity, genres and life cycles of PC games.
Source: innovatiana.com
New Yorker Caption Contest
- Size
- About 10,900 matching, 10,600 ranking and 2,600 explanation instances, each repeated over five cross-validation splits; 7.91 GB, Parquet
- Licence
- CC-BY 4.0
Matching, ranking and explanation tasks (about 10,900, 10,600 and 2,600 instances, each repeated over five cross-validation splits) from the New Yorker caption contest in 7.91 GB of Parquet, with many human-written humorous captions per cartoon. A rare benchmark for humour, which demands cultural and pragmatic inference rather than description.
Testing and training models to understand multimodal humour, improving generation of creative captions, and exploring complex contextual understanding between images and text.
Source: innovatiana.com
Art Portraits
- Size
- 10,600 images in JPG format
- Licence
- CC0: Public Domain
Over 10,000 JPG artistic portrait images, pre-aligned and cleaned, assembled for training GAN models and other creative image-generation work. Alignment is the practical value: no face-cropping pipeline needed.
Training GANs for artistic image generation, exploring portrait styles in creative AI, and creating image transformation or stylisation tools.
Source: innovatiana.com
Letterbox Movie Classification Dataset
- Size
- 10,002 movies, CSV file with 15 columns (texts, categories, numeric)
- Licence
- CC0: Public Domain
Metadata for 10,002 films in a 15-column CSV mixing text, categorical and numeric fields, covering genres, directors, duration, language and engagement metrics, plus text descriptions suitable for NLP.
Creating content or popularity based film recommendation, analysing genre, studio or rating trends over time, and classifying or clustering films by theme or user behaviour.
Source: innovatiana.com
Gutenberg Dataset
- Size
- Several tens of thousands of books, TXT and EPUB format
- Licence
- Public domain, under Project Gutenberg terms and conditions. Verification required for commercial redistributions
Several tens of thousands of public domain literary works in TXT and EPUB from Project Gutenberg, spanning novels, essays, theatre and poetry. Commercial redistribution requires checking Gutenberg's own terms.
Training text generation or completion, linguistic and stylistic analysis across authors, automatic summarisation or literary classification, and studying language change over time.
Source: innovatiana.com
Comic 9K
- Size
- Approximately 238,000 images in standard formats, accompanied by text synopses, Parquet files and tar.gz archives
- Licence
- Apache 2.0 as labelled by the uploader; the pages come from published commercial comics (Marvel titles among them), which that label cannot license
Roughly 238,000 comic book images in standard formats with human-written storyline synopses, distributed as Parquet files and tar.gz archives. Note the image count far exceeds the 9K in its name, which refers to titles. The Apache 2.0 tag is the uploader's: the pages come from published comics such as Marvel titles, whose copyright it does not clear.
Training vision models specialised in comic books, developing multimodal image-and-text models for summaries or narrative generation, and analysing graphic narrative content.
Source: innovatiana.com
Movie Posters 100K ControlNet
- Size
- 10,000 high-resolution images + OCR annotations, approximately 42.5 GB, Parquet format
- Licence
- Apache 2.0 as labelled by the uploader; the posters are film-studio artwork with no stated source, which that label cannot license
10,000 high-resolution movie posters in about 42.5 GB of Parquet, with layout annotations extracted via PaddleOCR and captions built from each title plus one or more genres. The card describes about 10,000 posters curated from a 100K-poster set, although the dataset viewer lists 91,000 rows. The Apache 2.0 tag is the uploader's and does not clear the studios' poster artwork.
Training layout-to-image generation, using ControlNet to generate custom posters from a canvas, and analysing poster graphic structure for classification or design.
Source: innovatiana.com
7K Books with Metadata
- Size
- 6,542 rows in CSV format, containing titles, authors, descriptions, ISBNs, language, categories
- Licence
- Labelled CC0 by the uploader; built from the Google Books API and Goodreads, whose terms apply
6,542 CSV rows of book metadata including title, author, description, ISBN, language and categories, sourced through the Google Books API from Goodreads data. Note the actual row count is below the 7K in its name. The book descriptions remain the publishers' copyright and the API data falls under Google Books and Goodreads terms, so the CC0 tag is the uploader's, not the rights holders'.
Creating a content-based book recommendation engine, analysing literary trends by category or description, and NLP experiments in summarisation and semantic clustering.
Source: innovatiana.com
Netflix Movies and TV Shows 2021
- Size
- 5,897 rows in CSV format, structured columns (title, genre, country, IMDb rating...)
- Licence
- Labelled CC0 by the uploader; catalogue data collected from the Flixable search engine
5,897 CSV rows of structured metadata on films and series available on Netflix in 2021, covering type, country, release date, duration, genres and IMDb rating. Small and tabular. The CC0 tag is the uploader's: the catalogue was collected from the Flixable search engine, so it is not a dedication by the rights holders.
Creating recommendation systems based on ratings or genres, analysing Netflix programming by country or year, and exploring cultural preferences through availability.
Source: innovatiana.com
How this list was put together
Shortlisted from the 16 datasets in Dataset Finder's verified set of 434 open datasets tagged “Media, culture & misc. open data”. Where the theme holds more than twelve, we prefer datasets whose licence is stated unambiguously and whose published scale is largest, so that the list is usable rather than merely long.
Sizes and licences come from each dataset's own documentation, vague wording included. Where we found a re-upload or catalogue card stating a licence that the original release contradicts, the entry gives the original terms and says so. The comparison table abbreviates licences to standard identifiers and marks vague ones as unclear.