Reel ArchiveEvery film in this archive is in the public domain. That is not a loophole or an oversight — it is what happens when copyright expires, or when a rights holder failed to renew a registration under the rules that applied at the time.
Several famous titles fell into the public domain by accident. His Girl Friday lost its protection because the copyright was never renewed. Others, like The Lost World, are simply old enough that protection has run out.
We do not decide any of this ourselves. Every film here is drawn from the Internet Archive, and each entry records the rights statement the Archive publishes for that item. You will find it at the bottom of every film page, with a link back to the original.
It matters because streaming a copyrighted film without permission is piracy, whatever a website calls itself. Building the catalogue from material that is genuinely free was a constraint we set before writing a line of code — and it is the reason this archive is small and curated rather than large and indiscriminate.