About the building

Public Domain Flicks reports which films are out of copyright in the United States, and the record that put them there. The site is arranged as five rooms of a film archive, and every piece sits on one of them.

What each room holds

• 01 Cold Corridor — The law behind the shelf — the Sonny Bono Act, the 95-year term, and what arrives each January.
• 02 Long Shelf — Named films, named reasons — the works that are free, and the precise moment each one crossed.
• 03 Scanning Room — Where the prints actually live — the Internet Archive, Prelinger, the Library of Congress, and why a restoration is not the same as the film.
• 04 Front Office — The commercial layer — Criterion, Kino Lorber, the 1990s PD-DVD trade, colourisation claims, and Content ID.
• 05 Card Trays — Reading the record — copyright notices, renewal registration, the Catalog of Copyright Entries, Stanford's database, and why a distributor's claim on a print is not a claim on the film.

How a status is stated

Copyright status is reported as the record shows it, with the statute, the registration or the decision named in the sentence. Where a film is free but a score, a song or an underlying novel is not, the piece says which is which.

Finding a piece

Every room is in the top bar, and the whole building lists all 27 pieces on one page.