Wikipedia to the rescue!
It’s not a complete list but…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States
You can sort the table by release year.
Some more recent movies entered the public domain because of failure to display copyright, or failure to renew copyright.
Apparently Debbie Does Dallas is now public domain!
Apparently all works from 1929 entered the public domain starting in January 1st 2025:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/
12 more Mickey Mouse shorts, and the 1929 version of Popeye!
Battleship Potemkin
Nanook of the North
I was reading wikipedia articles on “greatest movies” and both of those were uploaded in full. They’re not very “latest” though
And by latest do you mean recently made PD?
Anyway, I am uploading some here:
https://video.infosec.exchange/a/emperor/
You can subscribe to them on here via:
- !publicdomainaction@video.infosec.exchange
- !publicdomainanimation@video.infosec.exchange
- !publicdomaincomedy@video.infosec.exchange
- !publicdomainhorror@video.infosec.exchange
- !publicdomainscifi@video.infosec.exchange
However, we’ve experimented with them and they aren’t currently drawing over new videos into Lemmy, and @flamingos@feddit.uk has figured out why so we should be getting that fixed.
Of the ones I updated I’d flag up:
- Steamboat Willy - just became PD this year and means that version of Mickey Mouse is now free to use, at least initially that means in crappy horror films.
- Laurel and Hardy: Battle of the Century - once thought to be lost except for the custard pie fight (which my Dad was a big fan of), the bulk of it has been found and it is all now PD.
Would folks be interested in a “public domain film” community? I’ve pondered starting one.
The fix has been merged, but it hasn’t been backported to the 0.19 branch yet. It’s been brought up in another issue and it should be fairly simple to backport (most of the code isn’t even relevant for the 0.19 branch), so I’ll try to do that for Lemmy 0.19.12.
An impressive amount of work there - good to here it’s sorted.
