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Home cinema

One thing before we start: the brilliant movies you want to watch over and over again, groundbreaking animations and movies of similar quality are not yet available under free licences. This is due to the expensive film production process. Which amateur director has scores of extras of Ben Hur proportions or render farms for battalions of Orcs at his disposal? However, low budget movies like the Blair Witch Project could easily find their way onto the internet nowadays. So far, only a handful of free films have become available for legal download under Creative Commons licences, for example Cactuses or the animation Elephants Dream, which was created using open source software like Blender, Gimp and Inkscape.

Elephants Dream
The movie Elephants Dream was created using Blender and other free software programs.

Fans of eroticism used to have access to The Good Girl, a Spanish women's porn movie which was initially released for download under CC licence but has in the meantime been integrated in a longer movie project by the director and is no longer freely available. Those who like quiet nature films can try Aqualounge, a deep sea film of which eight releases are available under CC licence. Another German project under CC licence is Route 66 by VEB Film Leipzig. Its creators already have their second open source movie called The Last Drug in post production. Another newly added example in the Creative Commons pool is the documentary A Story of Healing about doctors in the Mekong delta in Vietnam.

Since "free" isn't necessarily the "free lunch" kind of free even with movies under CC licence, projects like the current Swarm of Angels are organised in a participatory way. For about £25, an "angel" can vote on creative decisions and get preferential treatment such as priority downloads and bonus materials on DVDs. According to the website, however, the project is to be available for free download and remixing on the internet after its completion. So the contribution is used to influence the original release of the movie.

Classics

So far, the simplest legal way to obtain free movies on the internet is to download older movies which have become public domain because their copyrights have expired. OpenFlix contains an extensive list of such movies, but doesn't offer them for download. The web pages of Archive.org, on the other hand, maintain an archive of films ranging from M by Fritz Lang to clips from world war propaganda films and modern documentaries like the BBC's The Power of Nightmares. The collection especially stands out due to its large number of brick films (Lego animations from Spiderman to Star Wars) and Machinima (3D animations based on computer game engines). If you prefer torrents, check out Public Domain Torrents.

Betty Boop
Cartoon classics at archive.org: Betty Boop

One point of interest concerning these archives is not so much which films are currently available but rather how you can use what's on offer for your own developments. An 80s documentary like Atomic Cafe - filmed during a time when Ronald Reagan was still dreaming of nuclear protection through shields in outer space - contains classic film sequences which are conveniently available for download from Archive.org: anyone can nowadays make their own feature about nuclear wars using the US government's Duck and Cover civil defense clip.

You can also view and download from the Prelinger Archives at Archive.org. The Prelinger Archives contain several thousand educational films and documentaries - for example a considerable amount of material by Charles and Ray Eames, who designed and filmed computer technology documentaries and exhibitions for IBM in the late 50s.

The free movies which are actually available at present can conveniently be found at Legal Torrents or Legit Torrents – although both torrent sites offer virtually the same collection.

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