In the District Court of the United States, for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the United States of America, petitioner, vs. Motion Picture Patents Company, et al., defendants (1913)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

H. N. Marvin, Direct Examination. 1259 Edison Company and some of its licensees had temporarily supplied films, but not materially different. Q. During the time of the Edison license agreement, the Biograph Company, and George Kleine on one side, and the Edison Company and its licensees on the other side, were competing, were they not? A. Yes. Q. Did the Biograph Company cut its prices during that period? A. Never. Q. What provision was contained in the license agreement between the Motion Picture Patents Company and the licensed producers of motion pictures, relative to alterations in the price scale? A. Well, the price scale was originally fixed as representing a reasonable price at which it was possible to supply motion picture films under the conditions that existed, and this was reached or agreed upon after consultation with the licensees, and in view of the business conditions as they found them, and it was considered reasonable and right that if those conditions should materially change in the future, there should be some provision by which these changed business conditions could be reflected in the price scale. Therefore it was provided that the scale might be changed from time to time according to the opinions of the majority of the licensees. Q. And how were the licensees to indicate their opinion? A. They were to indicate their views upon the matter by voting, on a basis of the quantity of motion pictures that had been issued by them during the previous year. Q. What is meant by running feet of new subjects? A. By that expression is meant the number of running feet in a positive print, or copy of a negative subject; that is, that indicates approximately the length of the negative, and is independent of the aggregate number of feet of copies that may be made from that negative. Q. When the Patents Company granted licenses for projecting machines, what proportion of machines in the market were licensed? A. Well, it licensed substantially all of the machines that were then in the market. There might have been possibly one or two that were not licensed, but they were too insignificant to consider. Possibly five per cent, or less. Q. You would say, at least ninety-five per cent, of the models of projecting machines on the market were licensed? A. I should say so, yes.