15 great movies online for free
Okay, the holidays have left you exhausted, broke and in need of inspiration. How about 15 classic movies? Online? For free? Via Moviefone:
I’m not sure how many movie fans know this, but in addition to all those movies you can download illegally, and the movies you can pay to download from iTunes, you can also stream and download hundreds of movies absolutely free, with no fear or legal consequences. It’s a little complicated as to how this happened, but these movies are considered to be in the “public domain,” which basically means that their copyright has expired and was never renewed. This is very common for early movies made before 1923, and a little less common for movies after that, and nearly nonexistent for recent movies; copyrights received today extend — apparently — for 95 years.
Public domain is always in flux. Famously, Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946) was once in the public domain, which led to its being shown on television hundreds of times during the holiday season, on various different channels. Eventually someone discovered that the film’s musical score was still under copyright, and now it has been scaled back to a once-a-year event showing.
Sites like Archive.org or Archive Classic Movies (no connection) offer large collections of these movies for streaming or for download. Other sites like Public Domain Torrents allow users to download movies in various formats, and are even ready to be burned to DVDs or for use on iPods. (The problem with this site is that it’s not very popular and there are very few “seeders.”) And Oldies.com sells public domain DVDs for about $5 each, with really nice-looking box art. Anyway, if you have your computer handy and some time to kill watching a movie, these are some of the gems you can watch, gratis.
Here’s the list of movies:
1. ‘Sherlock Jr.’ (1924, Buster Keaton)
2. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968, George A. Romero)
3. ‘His Girl Friday’ (1940, Howard Hawks)
4. ‘Zero for Conduct’ (1933, Jean Vigo)
5. ‘Superman’ (1941, Dave Fleischer)
6. ‘Spider Baby’ (1964, Jack Hill)
7. ‘Detour’ (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
8. W.C. Fields Short Films (1930–1933)
9. ‘Scarlet Street’ (1945, Fritz Lang)
10. ‘He Walked by Night’ (1949, Anthony Mann)
11. ‘The Stranger’ (1946, Orson Welles)
12. ‘Sita Sings the Blues’ (2009, Nina Paley)
13. ‘Beat the Devil’ (1954, John Huston)
14. ‘Carnival of Souls’ (1962, Herk Harvey)
15. ‘Santa Claus Conquers the Martians’ (1964, Nicholas Webster)
Hit this and you’ll find links to all these movies.
Happy New Year!
UPDATE: A question arose in comments from Monsieur Bake:
Does this mean that all these movies are also open to be freely adapted/re-made, with no legal hassles?
My guess is that someone still owns copyrights on the movies. However as I understand it, anything published before 1923 is in the public domain. I also seem to remember there were some revisions to the copyright law when Clinton was president. I found this article that might be helpful. However if any lawyers out there would care to weigh in, I’d appreciate it.
And of course, Monsieur Bake, you can do what Hollywood has always done: Recycle an idea by twisting the concept just enough to be similar but different than the original.
UPDATE #2: As fate would have it, I stumbled on this Toronto Sun article via tweet: 100 movies in the public domain.
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