What is Cinemoan?
Cinemoan is a website dedicated to film which is focused on free movies you can watch online. You will also find sections for movies you can watch with ads. You can also expect articles about movies freely distributed by the copyright holders.
Whenever possible, our lists of public domain movies are thoroughly researched. You can expect to find details about how and when each movie fell into the public domain. You’ll also find several resources on our website to help you research public domain films.
The idea of Cinemoan is to provide visitors with a repository of free movies that are legal to watch. Our goal is to provide at least 1,000 free movies at any given time. You might notice that we’re just short of that goal at the moment, but that won’t always be the case.
Cinemoan will also produce reviews and special interest articles about film. If you have any information to share with us regarding films you can watch for free online, please feel free to reach out to the owner at stoudish@yahoo.com.
How Do You Determine the Legality of Free Movies?
There are several steps taken to prove that the movies on this website are free and legal to watch. Here are a few examples of the process used to determine the legality of free movies listed on this site.
- Lists of movies thought to be in the public domain are researched.
- Upon finding a film that might be public domain, we will first search to see if there is evidence regarding how that happened.
- If these details are not available, a search will be done through the United States Copyright Office in an attempt to find more evidence.
- Copyright searches are done for the film itself, the script, and the music in the movie.
- If no copyright exists for any of these pieces of the artwork, there’s a good chance it is in the public domain.
There are other steps which can be taken to prove copyright status or determine how a movie became public domain, but this list covers the basics. If you’re looking for more tips, check our list of public domain resources.
In the case of other free movies online, we will only share films distributed by the copyright owner. In most cases, these films will be free with ads, but there are a lot of titles that the studios themselves release to the public without ads. Expect more details about these examples in the future.