A Charlie Parker alto sax. The original patent model for the Singer sewing machine. Around 75,000 specimens of bees. All of these live in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the sprawling cultural organization that comprises 19 museums, nine research centers, and one 163-acre zoo. As of this week, images of these artifacts, part of a trove of 2.8 million digital pictures and 3-D models, will be in the public domain for the first time under the Smithsonian's new Open Access program.

The Smithsonian is not the first organization to take the public domain plunge. More than 500 cultural heritage institutions have already done so, including heavy hitters like the Dutch Rijksmuseum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the Smithsonian’s contributions to the commonweal still stands out, not only for its breadth but for its permissiveness. You can download all of these images and models for free, and use them however you want. There are no strings attached.

“This is much more than about access,” Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said at an Open Access launch event Tuesday night. “We are empowering our audiences, empowering them to remix, to repurpose, to reimagine all the richness we offer. We’re inviting our viewers to become collaborators.” Fittingly, Smithsonian Magazine first reported on the effort; you can search through the collection yourself right here.

The Smithsonian could have been far more restrictive; it could easily have disallowed commercial use, for instance, or derivative interpretations. Instead, it opted for a Creative Commons Zero license, which puts no limitations on what the public can do with a given work. If you want to sell a T-shirt imprinted with an 18th-century painting of George Washington from the National Portrait Gallery, happy hawking.

The Smithsonian also hopes for more lofty applications. The stash it released includes not just media, but data that it hopes will fuel educational and research efforts. As part of its Open Access effort, it launched a public application programming interface and put its collection data in a GitHub repository. It’s already working with Google, for instance, to use machine learning to surface overlooked stories of women in science. And artist Amy Karle has used early access to the platform to create a series of sculptures based on Hatcher, a 66-million-year-old triceratops housed at the National Museum of Natural History. By opting for CC0, it places no limits on what forms that inspiration might take.

“The desire to restrict any kind of commercial use, to restrict any kind of mash-up, is very understandable,” says James Boyle, cofounder of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and one of the founding board members of Creative Commons. “The trouble is the most exciting reuses of this work may well be things we can’t imagine, that restrictions like non-commercial and non-derivative would foreclose. We don’t know what we don’t have because we don’t have it.”

The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, applauded the Smithsonian’s decision, citing in particular hopes that having so much hi-res art and mineable research data available online will help better balance representation. “Women are historically underrepresented everywhere that we go, not just on the internet but in the world,” said Wikimedia executive director Katherine Maher at Tuesday’s event. “On Wikipedia in particular, only 18 percent of biographies are of women. Representation matters.” Projects like Google’s will help fill out that roster, and the stash of high-quality images will ideally help bring those entries to life.

Courtesy of The Smithsonian Institution

The commercial and artistic possibilities abound as well. “It will have a positive impact on those who develop works that depend on archival images, including myself—researches, teachers, historians, documentary producers,” says Marina Amaral, a photo colorization and restoration specialist. “I'm already exploring the photographs and selecting a few of them to use in my next projects.”