How titles are vetted
Measured from the live catalog on 2026-09-16.
A fair thing to assume about an app built on the Internet Archive is that it shows whatever the Archive has tagged as a film — and that a lot of that is mislabeled, unplayable, or a trailer standing in for a feature. That is true of the raw material. This page is the account of what is done about it, with the current numbers, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The catalog holds 40,757 records. 28,011 are shown. 12,746 — 31% — are hidden, and every one of them is hidden for a stated, reversible reason.
What is hidden on rights
Public domain is treated as something to be evidenced, not assumed. Age alone clears a film only before 1930. Everything later needs a real licence, a government origin, or a rights statement on the Archive item itself. An uploader ticking "public domain" is a claim, not evidence, and does not clear anything on its own.
| 5,206 | Modern films with no licence behind them — confirmed against the Archive item's own rights statement, not guessed from the year. |
| 1,157 | Advertising from 1995 onward, where a brand's copyright is live. |
| 458 | Compilation and bulk-upload reels with no identifiable work in them. |
| 138 | 1964-77 films with a large enough commercial footprint that a renewal is likely — a studio picture wearing an uploader's licence. |
| 46 | Modern uploads wearing an old film's year because an external match was wrong. A 2022 documentary matched to a 1919 short is not a 1919 short. |
| 39 | Pre-1964 films whose copyright was demonstrably renewed. |
| 28 | Trailers, which are separately copyrighted and are not the film. |
| 5 | Modern-looking uploads carrying no year at all, so age cannot clear them. |
| 2 | Files in a container no supported player can open. |
What is hidden because it does not play
Every file is probed, not trusted. A title that cannot decode is removed rather than left to fail in front of a viewer.
| 263 | the video file is gone from archive.org since ingest |
| 427 | the file is truncated or has no moov atom — it cannot decode |
| 218 | AV1 or VP9, which no Apple device decodes |
| 5 | a copy that needs re-sourcing before it can be offered |
What is checked on the titles that remain
| 33,931 | titles whose video file has been fetched and verified to decode |
| 18,478 | titles whose external match was checked against the Archive item's own identifiers, date and colour — so a 1950s game show cannot wear a 2012 anime's poster |
| 21,870 | artwork URLs checked for liveness, on a repeating schedule rather than once |
| 6,469 | films clear on age alone (published before 1930) |
| 540 | films clear on a real licence recorded by the Archive item |
| 104 | trailers identified and removed as data, so a trailer is never served as the feature |
| 158 | adult titles hidden; mature content is off by default on every platform |
What is still wrong
A vetting page that only lists successes is marketing. These are the known gaps, and they are worked in the open:
- Television has never been through the rights audit. Episodes live outside the film catalog and were gathered by a path that applied no rights test. Several hundred shows from 1978 onward are almost certainly still copyrighted.
- The 1964-77 band is judged by footprint, not by record. US copyright of that era depended on renewal, and renewal records are not machine-readable at this scale. Films with a large commercial footprint are hidden; smaller ones are shown. Some of those will be wrong in both directions.
- Wrong external matches keep surfacing. They are found and cleared continuously — a batch of about a hundred was found and hidden on 11 September 2026 alone — which means more remain.
If you find something wrong
Report it and it gets fixed. Suggestions and corrections go through the curation tool, and anything hidden here is hidden behind a flag that can be reversed — nothing is deleted.