Five rooms, 27 pieces, one floor
Everything the site holdsRoom 01
Cold Corridor
The law behind the shelf — the Sonny Bono Act, the 95-year term, and what arrives each January.
Room 02
Long Shelf
Named films, named reasons — the works that are free, and the precise moment each one crossed.
- 02.01Three Words Missing from a Notice
- 02.02Steamboat Willie, 1 January 2024
- 02.03The Twenty-Eighth Year, and Who Forgot It
- 02.04Charade and the Notice That Was Not Enough
- 02.05His Girl Friday: Free Here, Adapted From There
- 02.06The Fleischer Superman Shorts: Seventeen Films, Seventeen Renewals Missed
- 02.07Detour and the Renewal That Never Came
- 02.08Plan 9 from Outer Space: Free by Accident, Famous by Repetition
- 02.09Nosferatu in Two Territories
Room 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.
Room 04
Front Office
The commercial layer — Criterion, Kino Lorber, the 1990s PD-DVD trade, colourisation claims, and Content ID.
Room 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.