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Public Domain from Outer Space
Black_by_Pubic_Deman writes "It is a work of art that truly represents the nadir of film making; a movie so bad that it's good. It has been labelled 'The Worst Movie Ever' by the Golden Turkey Awards and is also the winner of two notable Razzies. Ed Wood's classic and every Slashdot reader's favorite movie Plan 9 from Outer Space is now in the Public Domain and available as a free download thanks to the fine folks over at Archive.org."
Plan 9 From Outer Space is better than half the movies available in the theatres now.
It was on TV late at night about 15 years ago when I was still a teen. I was wondering what that was until I saw the movie with Depp.
Still, I don't know if Plan 9 is truly the worst movie ever. I have to agree with the MST3K crew that there are several others even worse, like Manos.
Perhaps we can place a copy onboard for the next shuttle launch and send that piece back where it came fome. *shudder*
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
The Plan 9 OS (which really was named after the film :-) is under an Open Source license. It's a weird one nobody else uses but it is certified Open, AFAIK.
Not quite Public Domain but good enough for most purposes.
It may not be public domain, but it certainly does qualify as the worst operating system ever. :)
Anyways, it couldn't be any worse than Battlefield Earth, could it? Or am I about to have to give up my geek card?
Now, if it is as bad as you say, there should be an MST3K of it somewhere. THAT I would like to see.
#define CLUE 0
No kidding; especially since Plan 9 had Bela Lugosi and The Matrix had Kenny whats-his-name.
After all, it's future events such as these that affect us in the future!
would have to be Gay Niggers From Outer Space.
The GNAA put out a torrent of a VHS rip for those curious how bad a movie can be.
It might have rock-bottom production values and a below-b-grade script, but thinking about it I don't it's any less enjoyable a movie to watch than Spiderman 2 or *other random hollywood movie*.
It's worth watching just to know what everyone's on about.
"Karloff did not deserve to smell my shit! That limey cocksucker can rot in Hell for all I care!"
Oh, and there's a great scene where EW meets Orson Welles, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, except that Welles' voice is uncannily dubbed by Maurice la Marche (Kif & the Robot Devil in Futurama, The Brain in Pinky & The Brain, etc.)
Why make one, http://isohunt.com/download.php?mode=bt&id=4612267 there already is one ;)
sadly, it only has one seed and 2 leachers and frankly, it might not be the exact same as the version that was available freely...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/
True, and often it's not the money. I'd gladly give $1 to have the movie here and now. But it's the overhead. Register, confirm by email, give details, enter billing information, confirm, etc, etc. Purchasing registration of a program online takes half a hour. Downloading a crack takes 5 minutes. It's not about the price in money, it's about the price in your time and effort the sellers demand.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Why make one, http://isohunt.com/download.php?mode=bt&id=4612267 there already is one ;)
sadly, it only has one seed and 2 leachers and frankly, it might not be the exact same as the version that was available freely...
No, the truly sad thing is that even though this movie is now in the public domain that isohunt link is probably still illegal due to its source.
Somebody is going to have to mirror the Archive.org version since they don't claim any copyright on their copy and hope they got it from the original source.
Too bad that it's actually not watchable. I mean, there's something cool about something so bad it's good, but this movie is so bad that it went straight through bad, PAST so bad it's good, and back into bad again, so bad it's undescribably unpleasant to watch it. I'm talking kicked in the testicles bad. but worse.
The only movie I have ever seen that I disliked more was a tie between Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. If there was ever a case for copyright extension, keeping those piles of shit out of the public domain IS IT.
I am NOT kidding. This movie is BAD.
Like anyone could even know that, Napoleon!
If it's in the public domain it should't matter where you got it from...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Here is an interesting tidbit. In its day, that film was considered communist propaganda for making a common man the hero and a banker the villian. Now, the entertainment industry would have us believe that the public domain is a communist plot, and that "intellectual property" (pure vapor) is worth more than tangible things. Well, it's not!
In the near future people might literally ask, "Public domain? What's that?" and only historians will be able to explain the concept. It will be as extinct as the Dodo Bird.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Who keeps modding these comments down? "Gay Niggers From Outer Space is a REAL MOVIE", and asking which one worse is on-topic. To answer your question: It's bad, but not even as bad as Plan 9 From Outer Space.
You heard me right, if forced at gunpoint to choose between watching Plan 9 and Gay Niggers, I'd watch Gay Niggers From Outer Space. God help me if it ever comes to that.
The truly sad thing about your post is that I am entirely unable to discern whether or not you are being serious.
English is easier said than done.
What I'd like to know is why archive.org, king of bulk data transfer, doesn't automatically provide bittorrents of all of their larger files. It would have to save them some stupidly large amount of money in bandwidth costs.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I see everyone claiming this movie is in the public domain, but I don't see any evidence that it really IS. Just how did this copyrighted work become no-longer copyrighted? AFAIK it's not old enough for the copyright to have expired.
On another note, I don't think this movie truly qualifies as bad. Sure it's crap, but is it bad? I remember an interesting film essay that said for a movie to be truly bad, it had to have a grand concept that was so arrogant or so ham-handedly executed that it turned on itself and became bad. Sort of hard to explain the whole essay in a couple of sentences, but to give you an example of the movies considered truly bad, he used the examples of "Pay It Forward" and "Grand Canyon."
Now to me, nothing surpasses the horror of what I consider the worst film ever made, by Robert Altman, starring Karen Black, Cher, Sandy Dennis, and Kathy Bates.. that horror is: "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." This film even fulfills that essayist's ideas, the concept is "high theatre" (it's a film of a 1-room 1 act broadway play) and it is so stridently, shriekingly feminist that it is like being trapped in a room for two hours with a bunch of suicidal women that just won't shut up.
I'm getting good speeds from their FTP.
I asked them this very question recently.
Here's your answer:
Speed Demos Archive - Lots of speed runs!
Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. This was on everywhere in the holiday season until then, but since is exclusively on NBC. Capra chose not to renew the copyright on that film, so it was his wish that it be public domain.
As I heard it, the film is still public domain, but the music in it was still under copyright; NBC bought the rights to the music, and is therefore able to control copyright of the film.
Theoretically, anyone could play it if they replaced the music (or cut the scenes which contain copyrighted music.)
But you're right - we are all being robbed.
Everyone talks about Ed Wood, Jr. being a totally incompetent filmmaker, but that is incorrect. Wood was selectively incompetent, which is far more interesting.
Genuinely incompetent films are incomprehensible; they're so badly written, filmed, lit, recorded, and edited you can't tell what's supposed to be happening moment to moment. They're dull. Ed Wood's films are interesting because he so weirdly mixes okay technical competence -- in the sense that you can follow the storytelling from scene to scene, because he tells it with acceptable narrative cohesion -- with utterly whacked-out, surreally incompetent plotting. He couches nonsensical ideas in the most portentous yet tone-deaf language. He displays a glorious ignorance of taste -- not "bad taste" in the too-conscious John-Waters sense, but a genuine vacuity of any informed sensibility at all.
Ed Wood is, in fact, an interesting filmmaker. This is true. If you've ever sat with an audience watching Glen or Glenda?, they stay all the way through, and the final scene has them cheering. Wood disastrously fails to engage his audience on the emotional level he intended, but he nonetheless engages them. A genuine incompetent couldn't do this.
I think Ed Wood is a telling case study that illuminates what we really mean when we talk about "genius."
The best news of all is that this script--pure Hollywood gold--is now available for Michael Bay or the Wachowski brothers to work their magic.
Tom Cruise as Jeff Trent! Jennifer Lopez as Paula Trent! William Shatner as Inspector Dan Clay!
Money in the bank, I tell you. Ka-ching!
Theoretically, anyone could play it if they replaced the music (or cut the scenes which contain copyrighted music.)
How hard would it be to remove the music from the sound track of It's a Wonderful Life and leave the dialogue and foley? Then you could have a Creative Commons contest for best film score, much as one of the old movie channels (TCM? AMC?) is having for silent films.
I have made the MPEG2 1.78 GB version of this file available via bittorrent. You can download the torrent from the following locations:
6 86368294eb5b9226a60534a442b497351c8b7c5
e ntdetails&id=356075
http://www.bogaa.org/details/185874
http://www.bitenova.org/index.php?idx=details&id=
http://www.torrentspy.com/directory.asp?mode=torr
http://www.mininova.org/tor/73675
I distribute the MPEG2 files from Archive.org via http://torrents.pdmdb.org/ but can bet that Slashdot would kill my webserver too. Hopefully it can at least handle the tracker.
Unfortunately, archive.org seems to be slashdotted at the moment, so I can't figure out what I really want to know -- How is it that this film is now in the public domain? Are there people that keep track of this sort of thing?
not really appropriate to this discussion... but... at the same time it is... i love old movies and i love archive.org, but there is something very lacking in the world today... i grayscale video codec! what's the deal?
You've managed to get a GNAA post modded +1 informative!
I tip my hat to you sir.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Fantastic 4 is out? Shit! I havn't even seen Fantastic 1 yet!
*also ducks*
What about the new trackerless torrent protocol though? They wouldnt need to run any tracker at all.
I watched this from Netflix a few months back.
I think my favorite line was:
"Why are we attcking you? Because you're a bunch of idiots!"
...combined with all the deep emotion of RFC 2616
You've obviously never read the "Clockless Origin Server Operation" section of RFC 2616.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Bono didn't cover everything, not by a long shot.
For instance, the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) has never been under copyright. Never, because back then, you had to put a copyright notice on your film or it was automatically in the public domain. NOTLD became a wild success, and sadly the original creators never saw much money from it.
No copyright law, extension or otherwise, has since fixed this problem. George Romero talks about this on pretty much every DVD commentary he's done.
It's maddening that something like NOTLD never made its creators any money, and yet Disney still rakes in billions from movies it made 70 years ago.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
What seems to happen here is that a person uploads a movie to Archive claiming that it's public domain and Archive does whatever research they do and decide whether to distribute it.
Another post points out that the Copyright Office database says Plan 9 was registered in 1958 and renewed in 1986, so the reasonable assumption would be that it's still covered unless the owner places it in Public Domain.
Archive's page for the movie says the uploader's site is at www.k-otic.com, a site which is basically an uploader's blog which does claim to have uploaded it.
The person who uploaded it doesn't seem to really do any research on movies' copyright status before uploading; (s)he says in a post about another upload that:
This does not really lead me to believe that the uploader contacted whoever owns the rights to Plan 9 and arranged for the film to be placed in the public domain.Summary: there's no reason to believe Plan 9 actually is Public Domain, since the first person to make the claim (the uploader) admits that (s)he has no way to be sure about the status of the movies (s)he uploads and Archive gives no evidence to support the claim except the uploader's original assertion.
-robin