About

Open Archive started with one idea: build a completely free, completely legal film library. Every film in the "Copyright-Free Archive" section is either in the public domain or shared under a Creative Commons license — none of it infringes anyone's copyright, and you can watch all of it start to finish, free and without ads.

How do we choose our films?

Every film we add is individually checked against its official license metadata on archive.org (the licenseurl field). We only add films whose license field explicitly contains "creativecommons.org" or "publicdomain" — we never rely on a collection's name or any other signal. This rule is never relaxed.

The Trailers section is different

The "Trailers — Current Movies" section at the top of the site shows official YouTube trailers, synopses pulled from TMDB, and director/cast info for movies in theaters and popular releases. This section is for promotional preview only — you can't watch these films in full, only their trailer. The list updates itself automatically from TMDB's live data.

How does the archive grow?

An automated scan runs every day in the background, searching archive.org for newly available films with verifiable licenses. Candidates are never added automatically — they're only surfaced as suggestions, individually reviewed and approved before they ever enter the archive.

If you think a film has a licensing error, or you'd like something added or removed, reach out to us on the Contact page.