Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Internet Archive: legally free

From the mail of the European Commission's Audiovisual and Media Policy Unit:

The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive works to bring together anything and everything that resides in the public domain, including movies:
http://www.archive.org/details/movies
For instance, they have gathered together 40 best movies that can be downloaded legally and for free:
http://blog.archive.org/2010/08/12/top-40-best-free-legal-movies-you-can-download-right-now/
The Internet Archive has a collections of some 150 billion web pages, 900,000 audio recordings, almost three million books and more than half a million moving image items.

In the ‘moving images’ list of ‘most downloaded’, cinema content is second only to games with an interesting mix of fiction and documentaries. Some examples include :

- 765,503 downloads for Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first ‘zombie classic’
- 516,196 for Duck and Cover, a 1952 cartoon teaching kids how to protect themselves from a nuclear attack.
- 363,556 for a montage of US Department of Defense footage on Nazi concentration camps
- 279,487 - The Fighting Lady, a 1944 war documentary by William Wyler
- Various Charlie Chaplin’s shorts from the late 1910s regularly score between 250,000 and 280,000 downloads
- 265,636 for D.W. Griffith’s 1930 Abraham Lincoln biography

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