The catalog
Public Domain TorrentsSource
Every title, genre, format and rating here came from their site. They have been collecting public domain film since the early 2000s, back when almost nobody was.
We read their catalog once, slowly. One page at a time, a second and a half apart, with a User-Agent that says exactly who is asking. Every page cached, so we never have to ask twice.
The films live with them. So do the summaries and the comments. Find something here, then go and get it there.
Years and artwork
The catalog does not record a year. Or a poster. So we asked three databases that do.
TheTVDBArtwork and years
Most of the artwork here is theirs. TheTVDB is built entry by entry, by volunteers, by hand.
Spot something wrong? Fix it at the source and it turns up here on the next pass. Or subscribe, and help keep the project running.
fanart.tvArtwork
More posters, from a community with strong opinions about what counts as good artwork.
Wikidata and Wikimedia CommonsYears and artwork
Nearly every year comes from Wikidata, released under CC0.
When neither of the others has a poster, Commons fills the gap. Every file there carries its own license and its own credit, on its own page.
Watching
The catalog points at downloads. Many of these films are also held by the Internet Archive, and those play here, in the page, without going anywhere else.
Internet ArchivePlayback and artwork
Press play and the Archive's own player opens inside the panel. Nothing is copied here: the film streams from them, on their bandwidth, and a second button opens the full item on their site. The player loads only when you ask for it, so opening a film never fetches video you did not want.
Films are matched by title and year, and only an exact title inside a one-year window counts. Then the match has to prove itself. The Archive holds trailers, clips and reviews under a film's own name, so the item's real running time is checked against the length the film should be, and anything much shorter is a clip.
That test removed 113 of 471 matches. Some films lose a button the Archive really does hold, which is the right trade — better a missing button than one that opens ninety seconds of trailer.
Where a matched item has artwork and nothing else did, its thumbnail becomes the poster.
Ratings
The catalog carries its own star ratings, but only for about half the films, and three quarters of those sit at four or five stars. Not much to sort by. So ratings come from IMDb where a film can be matched.
IMDbRatings
Information courtesy of IMDb. Used with permission. Ratings come from their public data export, matched by the IMDb ID that Wikidata holds for each film.
Where no rating exists, the catalog's own star stands in. The two are never mixed: a rating out of ten and a five-star vote from one small site measure different things, so they are shown on their own scales and the ten-point ratings sort first.
Descriptions
The source site writes its own synopses. Those are not ours to reprint, so the summaries here come from Wikipedia instead.
WikipediaDescriptions
Two opening sentences from each film's article, no more. Enough to decide whether to watch something, and no more of someone else's writing than that needs.
Wikipedia's text is published under CC BY-SA 4.0, which asks for credit and for the same freedom to be passed on. Every summary links back to the article it came from, and this page carries the same license for that text.
By the numbers
| Field | Source | Films |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Public Domain Torrents | — |
| Genre | Public Domain Torrents | — |
| Format | Public Domain Torrents | — |
| Rating, out of ten | IMDb | — |
| Star rating | Public Domain Torrents | — |
| Year | Wikidata, TheTVDB | — |
| Poster art | TheTVDB, fanart.tv, Commons, Archive | — |
| Plays in the page | Internet Archive | — |
| Description | Wikipedia | — |
| Director | Wikidata | — |
| Cast | Wikidata | — |
Matching
A title. That is all the catalog gives us. No year, no IMDb ID, nothing else to go on. So we match on the title alone, carefully.
- Exact, or nothing. Case, spacing and punctuation are leveled first. Skip this and a fuzzy search hands back a different film entirely, looking every bit as convincing as the right one.
- Nothing after 1990. The newest films here are cheap late-eighties pictures. A more recent match does not mean we found it. It means we found something else wearing the same name.
It is not foolproof. A remake from the same era clears both rules, so some years and posters here belong to the wrong film.
When we are not confident, we say nothing. No year. And a poster drawn from the title, rather than borrowed from a stranger.
What we don't do
- No synopses from the source site. They are theirs to keep.
- No films of our own. Nothing is hosted or copied here. What plays in the panel streams from the Internet Archive, and downloads stay with Public Domain Torrents.
- No screenshots lifted from their server.
- No tracking, no analytics, no cookies. One page and one data file. The posters load straight from TheTVDB, fanart.tv, Wikimedia and the Internet Archive, so those sites see the requests.
About the films
These are cataloged as public domain in the United States. Copyright expired, or was never renewed.
Status varies by country, and for a few films it is genuinely contested. What you see here reflects the source site's judgment. It is not legal advice.
Found a mistake?
Wrong poster. Wrong year. Missing film. Every one of them is fixable, and the fix belongs upstream.
- Film data — TheTVDB or Wikidata
- Ratings — IMDb
- Playback — Internet Archive
- Descriptions — Wikipedia
- Artwork — fanart.tv
- The catalog — Public Domain Torrents
Fix it there, and the next pass brings it here.