A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms (1932) is one of the most famous examples of a major studio film entering the public domain due to a clerical failure to renew the copyright. The film was originally registered by Paramount Productions, Inc. on December 1, 1932, under registration number LP3447. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, works from this era required a formal renewal filing with the U.S. Copyright Office during the 28th year of their initial term to maintain protection. Paramount failed to file a renewal application for the film's copyright in 1960. As a result, the film's copyright expired at the end of its first 28-year term and fell into the public domain in the United States. This status is widely documented in legal literature and film history reference works, including the 'Film Superlist' by David Pierce and the Stanford Copyright Renewal Database, which shows no entry for the motion picture. While the underlying 1929 Ernest Hemingway novel was successfully renewed and remains protected, the 1932 film adaptation itself (the visual and audio elements) is free for use, which accounts for its proliferation on low-cost home video labels and archive.org.