
Public Domain Movies - DanielleMolloy
http://publicdomainflix.com
======
Animats
Most of those are on the Internet Archive.[1] Often in better versions. The
Private Snafu cartoons are from some commercial DVD with watermarks. The
originals are online from the National Archives, and they're better.

A useful project would be to take the MPEG 2 versions from the Internet
Archive, apply modern cleanup, scratch removal, frame alignment, and exposure
equalization techniques, and put those up. The MPEG 2 versions have no frame
to frame compression, which is good for archival purposes. Cleanup technology
has improved since most of those were scanned.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/feature_films](https://archive.org/details/feature_films)

~~~
DanielleMolloy
Most people here know that they are on the Internet Archive. I personally
don't like their interface, and their wider movie collection [1] is mingled
with a lot of other material (TV ads, speedruns and machinima?). The IA is
more about creating a complete historical collection than providing an
entertainment service.

All streaming services currently lack older classics. I like the idea of a
dedicated "Netflix for public domain" movies.

Maybe someone would like to pick this idea up and improve it (I don't know the
dev). The video quality improvement sounds like a good idea already.

It would also be good to create versions of silent movies at their original
presentation speed [2] (16Hz is probably more accurate than 24Hz). Movies like
"The Passion of Joan of Arc" [3] should not be watched at a comical speed.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/movies](https://archive.org/details/movies)

[2]
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSpeedOfSilent...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSpeedOfSilents)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_KDf4xhU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_KDf4xhU8)

~~~
shakna
> I like the idea of a dedicated "Netflix for public domain" movies.

It might be a little bit rude to put it here, but that is something I'm
working on [0], though with a little bit wider of an approach - I'm actively
seeking indie productions as well.

[0] sixteenmm.org

> It would also be good to create versions of silent movies at their original
> presentation speed [2] (16Hz is probably more accurate than 24Hz).

Most of my focus at the moment is on a restoration tool I'm developing, but
this sounds like a great ideas I'll circle back to.

------
blauekapelle
To add to this; all of the Soviet films are available on YouTube with good
subtitles from an official channel. A really great one is "Ivan vassilievich
changes occupation".

[https://www.youtube.com/user/mosfilm](https://www.youtube.com/user/mosfilm)

~~~
jimhi
You just reminded me what an awesome movie this is

~~~
blauekapelle
Yeah it's one of my favourites. The old Sherlock Holmes are also amazing.

------
veridies
This reminds me of a thought I've had for a long time: it would be great to
commission high quality scans of some of these public domain films so that
everyone could enjoy some free movies and remix / reedit to their hearts
delight. Pretty much all the ones on IA are ripped from DVDs and look pretty
terrible. I'd happily donate to such a project; is anyone doing anything like
it?

~~~
jacksproit
That sounds like a great idea to me!

------
mrweasel
One project I wish someone would undertake is streaming of 1950-80 Hollywood
movies. There are some many great movies made in that period and many of them
are slower paced than modern movies. The really good ones are of cause still
owned by someone, but it doesn't seem like it would be to expensive to license
them, I'm mean they are already paid for and aren't making a ton of money on
DVD sales or TV licenses anyway. The tricky part would really be to find the
license holders and negotiate bulk licenses.

Similarly 1970 - 1990 porno streaming service seems like it should be able to
make a little profit.

~~~
nitrogen
There's a really good chance the rights owners are the same people who own
modern films and wouldn't want to undercut their new productions.

------
mysterydip
Got a couple PHP warnings on the site (mobile version at any rate), might want
to clean those up or adjust your php.ini to a "production" level where those
go to a log rather than the page.

Otherwise, I like it! Will pass it along.

------
hanniabu
If the author is here, the pages load and everything works, but this error
shows on every page:

Warning: Use of undefined constant browse_vid - assumed 'browse_vid' (this
will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in
/homepages/5/d229943463/htdocs/publicdomainflix/mobile/category.php on line 32

Using S7 galaxy, stock android, chrome

------
hanniabu
How does one go about finding movies that are public domain?

Would also be nice if the was a form for others to add new additions and a
citation link. Not sure if this is available once you register and login, if
it is then it'd be nice to not need to login for it.

~~~
shakna
> How does one go about finding movies that are public domain?

With extreme difficulty.

There are quite a few lists of films that have fallen out of copyright, or
were never registered correctly, but even those often contain elements, like
the soundtrack, that may continue to hold copyright.

Secondly, what is Public Domain in one nation may well not be in another. I
know of several films that are public domain in Australia, that won't reach
public domain in America for another fifty-seventy years, and vice versa.

Legally speaking, if you're broadcasting for everyone without checking where
they live, such as through the registration form, you can and do run up
against people willing to litigate you to death over a film made in the 60s
that hasn't seen mass broadcast since.

Finally, finding out who owns copyright of a work can be extremely difficult.
A company can go under or get carved up, and various trademarks and copyrights
can be passed around - often to different people, and occasionally, the
copyright can be lost in that mess or owned by an entity that no longer
exists. It's still not public domain - but nobody knows who should be angry at
you if you broadcast.

~~~
WalterBright
> nobody knows who should be angry at you if you broadcast.

I suggest the law should say to successfully assert copyright infringement,
your current contact info must be on file with the US Copyright Office, or
your copyright is unenforceable.

~~~
Sniffnoy
I think implicit copyright does have some advantages -- it means if you put
up, say, a T-shirt design on the internet, because you had an idea and thought
it was neat, not expecting it might be worth registering, other people can't
(legally) just start selling that T-shirt without paying you. Basically I
think it's not great if amateurs have to go to the trouble of always
explicitly registering minor things just _in case_ something catches on.

But obviously it has the giant problem you say, that so many works are locked
behind copyright snarls. A system of mandatory explicit registration would
have the huge advantage of making things much easier to track.

Here's a compromise idea I've had: Retain implicit copyright; however, unless
a copyright is explicitly registered, it cannot be sold, nor exclusively
licensed (i.e. if you license it to someone, but haven't registered it, you
cannot legally bind yourself not to license it to anyone else). And then any
sales or exclusivity agreements would be tracked by the registrar.

So, under this system, if you need to know who to talk to regarding a
copyright, then for explicitly registered copyrights you can consult the
registrar, while for non-registered copyrights the answer is always the
original creator. This does still leave the problem of finding the original
creator in the latter case, but it's still much better than it being unclear
who to consult at all.

It's possible there's some big hole in this I'm missing, but I'm hoping that
this compromise idea would capture much of the upsides both of requiring
explicit registration and of not requiring it.

(Not that such a thing will ever be implemented anytime soon, but...)

~~~
shakna
I think the biggest problem with copyright is the length of time it's enforced
for.

I'm happy enough with implicit copyright - though the argument about what
should be inherently copyrightable does need to be fleshed out.

However, the current system generally works out to about seventy years after
the death of the last person involved. (There are a lot of exceptions and
nuances to this - it's a generalisation). Which can mean that a work is
protected for nearly two hundred years. That is insane.

If we were to tame it back to two decades after last development, and make it
so that only people, and not companies, can own copyright, then we might be in
for a reasonable shot. (Companies can license copyright, and employ trademarks
to protect themselves.)

As it is, the current copyright laws stifle creativity, and hand over power of
most mainstream ideas to a corporation that can use things like DMCA and
Content ID as hammers against any little players in the field. You can't
create anything similar to what exists or has existed.

And yes, I do believe there is a 0% chance that this will ever happen
anywhere.

~~~
WalterBright
A reasonable compromise copyright scheme is to simply require a registration
for it to last beyond 20 years, along with a fee.

That'll filter out the vast bulk of the garbage copyrights, as well as the
stuff nobody knows who owns (likely including the owner).

~~~
vidarh
Tack onto that a fee that increases by a multiple for every 10 year extension
or so, so that the older the work the more commercially successful it needs to
be worth paying for ongoing protection of.

------
mholt
Heads up: this site doesn't use HTTPS, so anyone (for some definition of
"any") can see what you're watching, and potentially modify it.

~~~
PetahNZ
I don't know why this is something worth mentioning. If some one can MITM your
HTTP requests, they can just as easily MITM your DNS and SNI etc.

~~~
bitslip
Not sure how genuine you're being, but there's a big difference between
someone seeing the domain name of the website I'm visiting
(publicdomainflix.com), and seeing my username and password when I register.

~~~
kristopolous
Both attacks are equally deterministic and would be instrumented by software
which share the property that they only need to be written once.

The attacker needs to run either one program or another program (with more
sophisticated code but who cares, it's already written).

So really it's the same level of effort if you assume someone is just running
prebuilt software, which is usually the case

~~~
bitslip
For anyone reading this who isn't already familiar, the above is incorrect.

When you're browsing with HTTPS, a third party may see: \- Your DNS queries
(revealing the name of the website you're visiting),

\- The handshake of your TLS connection, including Server Name Indicating
(SNI) (revealing the name of the website you're visiting).

\- A third party on the network is not however able to see the content of the
website you're visiting, or the data you're submitting to the site.

When you're browsing with HTTP, a third party may see: \- Your DNS queries
(same as above)

\- The name of the website you're visiting (via the host header)

\- Any and all information sent between you and the website, as well as being
able to modify any and all data sent between you and the website.

~~~
kristopolous
Right but that wasn't the point. The idea sometimes put out is that a more
sophisticated instrumentation is less likely because it's more difficult. It's
a misapplication of the threat model principle.

It's a false claim because the instrumentation is automated and the execution
is identical.

To be even more specific about HTTPS, if someone is lying to you about DNS,
lying to you about the key signer and lying to you about the keys, it still
doesn't work because your browser ships with verification keys from the major
key signers.

So the attacker would still have to break cryptography because they couldn't
do a fake chain that matched the domain and the key that was sent to you with
your browser.

Now if someone managed to break RSA then again, this would become a single
program with as much effort to run as any other program even though it sounds
like a lot more work. But there's no public break so it's assumed to be
unachievable without vast computing resources.

------
bryanrasmussen
Beat the Devil
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beat_the_Devil_(1953...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beat_the_Devil_\(1953\).webm)
doesn't seem to be on there, also search is pretty bad, it doesn't look like
you can search by actors - for example neither Jimmy Stewart
[http://publicdomainflix.com/search.php?keywords=jimmy+stewar...](http://publicdomainflix.com/search.php?keywords=jimmy+stewart&video-
id=) or James Stewart works.

~~~
hanniabu
Yeah, would be nice additional info to search/filter with such as year,
language, color or black/white, lead actors, etc. Since this is all a free
effort, it could be group sourced via github.

------
wishinghand
I know about the current sad state of the length of copyright, but seeing it
on display really drives it home. So few films after 1960. Same issue with
books on Gutenberg.

~~~
zzo38computer
Some people will deliberately make their stuff public domain rather than being
copyright. My opinion is copyright is bad, so I also will make all of them
public domain, too.

~~~
ravenstine
I don't think copyright itself is bad, but the way in which Disney has gotten
the government to enforce it is absurd. If I ever release a creative work, I'd
make sure to do it in a way where the work is free to share but I would still
own the right to produce that work until I am dead. I think that's perfectly
reasonable, but copyright in the US today is effectively indefinite and
intentionally difficult to make sense of. All you have to do is shove a bunch
of other licensed copyrighted material into your work so that only your
company can resell that work after the main copyright has expired.

------
iscrewyou
It’s a good start and bookmarked but probably needs some kind of language
tagging. I browsed around a bit and click one this [0] in the 1970s
category... it’s in Hindi.

0 - [http://publicdomainflix.com/mobile/the-street-
fighter-1974_f...](http://publicdomainflix.com/mobile/the-street-
fighter-1974_fd4d4cc20.html)

------
lopespm
Browsing through the site I stumbled upon the "Why we fight" movie series[1].

Even though it is very biased and seems to have been a propaganda tool, the
movies are actually pretty well crafted.

The "public domain movies" site does not have the entire series, but you can
find them at youtube[2]

[1] [http://publicdomainflix.com/browse-documentary-
videos-1-date...](http://publicdomainflix.com/browse-documentary-
videos-1-date.html)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAsIWfk_z4&list=PLugwVCjzrJ...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAsIWfk_z4&list=PLugwVCjzrJsXwAiWBipTE9mTlFQC7H2rU)

------
gothroach
Looks great - like the IA's movie site but with a more consumer UI.
Unfortunately, none of the videos are playing for me in Chrome 75. I've tried
a few, they all say that the network failed or the format isn't supported.
Firefox seems to work, though.

~~~
S4M
More websites should fail on Chrome and work just fine on FireFox.

------
foobar_
I'm working on something similiar. If anyone else is, feel free to ping me!

------
joelthelion
This would be a great use case for PeerTube, no?

------
vinniejames
I literally had the tought to build something like this today. Nice work!

~~~
DanielleMolloy
I posted this simply because I liked the idea. Maybe someone would like to
pick it up and improve it.

------
ehsankia
How do they pay for the hosting? Is it purely donation based?

~~~
zakki
looks like they are a content aggregator. I tried to play some movies and all
of them are in youtube.

~~~
Jaruzel
Yes, the movies are embedded YouTube, but with their own playback controls
overlaid on top, which on my browser (Chrome Version 75.0.3770.90) couldn't be
hidden. Right clicking on the movie window and brings up the familiar YouTube
menu, where you can copy the original URL.

It makes sense: there's no way a one-person operation can afford the bandwidth
to stream movies. I am however impressed by the effort the owner goes to to
find out the copyright status of each entry.

------
daviddavis
No ‘Night of the Living Dead’?

~~~
zakki
[http://publicdomainflix.com/night-of-the-living-
dead-1968_bf...](http://publicdomainflix.com/night-of-the-living-
dead-1968_bfdc139c4.html)

~~~
jerf
I was wondering how that can be public domain. So to save others some
searching: [https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2016/10/25/why-night-of-
the-...](https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2016/10/25/why-night-of-the-living-
dead-is-public-domain/)

The short answer is, they forgot to put the copyright notice on it, and at the
time, that made it public domain.

~~~
bredren
Yes, 8 years later this law “bug” was patched.

Nice vid on this topic:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI1kqlt4vkA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI1kqlt4vkA)

------
Moxdi
crazy to think we are watching dead people

------
glenvdb
This made me realise that by the time my 2 year old son is old enough to watch
adult movies, movies from the decade I was born will be entering the public
domain.

~~~
snvzz
No, they won't. They'll just extend copyright length again. It's routine now.
And it's not a good thing.

~~~
oska
Your comment is an example of corrosive cynicism. And I don't think it's true
either. Resistance to further extensions has built since the last extension.

~~~
snvzz
Sure, just take notice that it's a seemingly appropriate response to an
excessively optimistic post.

What I was trying to express is:

No, if we just "leave things be", a copyright extension will happen again.

