Sad news. Freebase, a community created database of metadata on many topics, is shutting down this year, as announced here by Google, who bought the company that ran the freebase website: https://plus.google.com/109936836907132434202/posts/bu3z2wVqcQc
Fortunately, it looks like the data will be moved to http://www.wikidata.org, the open structured data repository run by the Wiki Media Foundation, the same NPO that runs Wikipedia. Hopefully this means that the metadata that was available from Freebase will remain usable and free to use.
