Free Movies Fallen out of Copyright

September 18, 2006 2:21 PM

Free Movies, Documentaries, Cartoons, TV-Shows, Music & Comedy - 100% handpicked content chosen to inform, educate, shock and entertain you. Most of the old films and cartoons are in public domain: "when a work's copyright or patent restrictions expire, it enters the public domain and may be used by anyone for any purpose." The newer media is probably not in public domain, they are just freely available for some unknown reason. Tomorrow they could be gone.
posted by crunchland (19 comments total)

It'd be nice if there were some indicator of which films were actually out of copyright, and which are just illegitimate, especially if your purpose is to remix/mashup, &c.
posted by crunchland at 2:48 PM on September 18, 2006

Yes! The ABC's of Sex Education for Trainable Persons.
posted by BoatMeme at 2:53 PM on September 18, 2006

Un chien andalou! (Now if only they had some Kenny Anger or Stan Brakhage.)
posted by orthogonality at 2:59 PM on September 18, 2006

If you're worried about the copyright status of something, try looking for it at Archive.org, where you can also download mpeg files instead of nasty flash files.
posted by black bile at 3:06 PM on September 18, 2006

indeed
posted by caddis at 4:05 PM on September 18, 2006

I blame Disney Mouse.
posted by Richard Daly at 4:29 PM on September 18, 2006

Hey, they have the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" on there. Syncronized.
posted by konolia at 4:39 PM on September 18, 2006

Orthogonality: I've found some of both on youtube - not great quality, but they're there.
posted by jessenoonan at 5:18 PM on September 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

There is a fair amount of Brakhage on YouTube, but I think in this particualr case the high compression makes it almost unworthwhile, since you lose such a staggering amount of what Brakhage was trying to show.
posted by MetaMonkey at 5:46 PM on September 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

For more free public doman greatness, check out this post.
posted by wheelieman at 6:01 PM on September 18, 2006

This site rocks! But will it stay around for long?
posted by Vindaloo at 7:14 PM on September 18, 2006

Sure it will, it is almost if not all videos in the public domain.
posted by caddis at 7:48 PM on September 18, 2006

i'm pretty certain that some of those are copyrighted ... i guess it says something about me that the first thing i watched was ali baba bunny ...
posted by pyramid termite at 8:45 PM on September 18, 2006

HASSAN CHOP!
posted by majick at 9:13 PM on September 18, 2006

See also, www.publicdomaintorrents.com. Some deservedly obscure ones, but classics and other good films too. If you can't find a seed or want better quality, they'll put them on disk for $1 per as avi's or $5 per as DVDs. (I am not associated with the site - just happened to come across it.)
posted by jam_pony at 10:40 PM on September 18, 2006

If you bother to view the source of the movie pages you'll see that what he's done is wrapper Google video and Youtube sources. This is in effect an index to content hosted by others.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:24 PM on September 18, 2006

Oh, and that www.publicdomaintorrents.com seems by an amazing coincidence to have the same content as the internet archive. But I guess it's okay because they've improved the collection by surrounding it with ads and enveloping it with third worst design on the web.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:51 PM on September 18, 2006

Here's George's internet archive link, with fixed HTML.
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:26 AM on September 19, 2006

This is in effect an index to content hosted by others.

Kinda like Metafilter, huh?
posted by crunchland at 5:41 AM on September 19, 2006