Free (Public Domain) Movies via Bit Torrent!

[thewayne]

This site has collected A LOT of movies that are in the public domain for whatever reason, coded them into DivX format, and released them as torrents. They only ask that you leave your torrent software running to help the performance of other people as they download these.

This might get me interested in watching movies on my laptop! I'm sure a lot of this is junk, but there should be plenty of cool stuff.

And it has information on what torrents are and how to install and work with them.

http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/

Comments

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

Interesting... the library filters blocked this as Peer-to-Peer file sharing.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Well, it sort of is P2P, then again, it sort of isn't. Traditional P2P is I have a client running, you have a client running, and you can copy a file from my PC. Torrents are somewhat different. The client reads pieces of the file from other people running the client, so no one person (including the main web site) gets their bandwidth clobbered by offering up huge download files.

What this web site provides is a seed directory of the films so that when you click on a film, your client connects to another client to get a piece. That client knows of a few other clients who also have pieces of the file you're looking for.

Meanwhile, once your client has downloaded a chunk, your client announces that you have that piece and shares said piece with anyone else downloading that file at that time.

It's not P2P like Kazaa was. And in this case, it's legal P2P because (a) the films are in the public domain and (b) if somehow one is not, they have a contact form to inform the operator.

I think it's a pretty good set-up. My only concern would be with Disney and Bono's copyright extension act, does anything fall into the public domain anymore without explicit release?

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

does anything fall into the public domain anymore without explicit release?

A question many inquiring minds want to know. What copyright was initially envisioned to be, and what it is becoming, is just plain bizzare. And that's coming from someone who wants her work protected in her lifetime! (which it is, more or less) Comparing copyright law to drug patents, you'd think laws were written on two different planets. Still, look at Burroughs and Doyle and Howard, quite aside from such giants as Disney. Holmes made the escape into public domain, but the Burroughs estate has fought tooth and nail to retain Tarzan control because, as you might guess, it's all about the money.

Interesting explanation of the P2P/torrent thing. From the filtering pov, it doesn't seem that different to me if I get 100 frames of a movie from you, or whether it's the whole movie. Its legality is site-dependent, and while the library has procedures to unblock on a site-by-site basis, I'm not pursuing that since if I were to want to use the site, I'd want to use it from home anyway. I was just curious what the site had to offer, when I tried to get it from work.