Online Videos: Full Akira Kurosawa Movies

http://stage6.divx.com/user/circleofdoom/video/1261556/Stray-Dog
Stray Dog- Eng Sub.

http://stage6.divx.com/user/circleofdoom/video/1267744/The-Bad-Sleep-Well—Kurosawa
The Bad Sleep Well-Eng Sub.

http://stage6.divx.com/The-Last-Stop/video/1188541/Rashoman
The Last Stop.Roshomon-Eng Sub.

http://stage6.divx.com/user/santiagojap/video/1467110/el-mercenario-(YOJIMBO)
Yojimbo.The Mercenary. Span Sub.

Ironically enough, the Wikipedia entry states “Inexpensive copies with English subtitles are easily found online” in regards to The Most Beautiful. However, this is not the case I have had no success in finding them film online.

Does anyone have a link to this film because, being a Kurosawa completist, I do very much wish to see it.

And on the same note, anyone have a link for Sanshiro Sugata II?

Well, The Most Beautiful usually is easy to find on sites like eBay (one seller, here), but the subtitles of this Mei Ah release are poor, and not far better from other asiatic (and more or less legal) releases.
The only other “easy to find” releases, to my knowledge, are the Toho ones, which don’t have english subtitles.

About Judo Saga II, there are french and australian releases (with french and english subtitles, accordingly), the australian one is from Madman; here again, you can buy Toho releases as another choice, if you understand japanese.

You may find some information on these releases on my site (The Most Beautiful, Judo Saga II); I don’t have information about other asiatic releases, as long as precise information is hard to get.

Thanks for the help Fabien, though I’d rather watch online streams of the films (seeming as they are in public domain) which are free rather than me purchasing them.

Oh, sorry, I didn’t get the point.
But the Wikipedia entry you are quoting, as far as I understand it, refers to physical releases (DVDs) of the film which can be bought online, and not to streaming versions.

Moreover, according to the deletion of several early Kurosawa films at Google Video and Archive.org, there are probably some legal issues or suspicions towards the “publicdomainness” of these films (intellectual property is complex, a fortiori with international points of view – some countries consider a film to fall in public domain 70 years after authors’ death, others 50 years after the first release, etc. and a lawsuit case has been recently reported here by Vili).

I fear also that the very few requests for these interesting but badly-renowned films will not encourage more releases.

Fabien is absolutely right, copyright laws are mind-bogglingly complicated. I think that the latest we have heard of the court case in Japan can be found here.

How much any of that applies to the rest of the world is a completely different question. I think that in most European countries, a work is under copyright for at least “70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the last principal director, author or composer dies.” (UK Copyright Service).

OpenFlix, meanwhile, notes that practically no foreign film released after 1923 is currently in public domain in the US.

I therefore doubt that any Kurosawa film is currently in public domain. But again, I am far from being an expert in international law. I have started researching this issue several times by now, and never really get anything else out of it than a headache!