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 (1914)

Record Details:

Title:
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
Date:
1914
Publisher:
New York, Appeal Printing Co.
Volume:
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 : record volume 5
Leaf #:
00060
Language:
English
Collection:
Early Cinema and Government & Law
Format:
Periodicals
Contributor:
The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
These seven volumes contain the testimonies and supporting documents from the U.S. District Court's antitrust lawsuit against the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). Formed in 1908, the MPPC (sometimes referred to asœ"the Edison Trust" or just "the Trust") sought to control the American film industry through pooling patents and demanding that producers and exhibitors acquire licenses to those patents. Independent producers and exhibitors, who refused to license the patents, argued that the MPPC was an unlawful monopoly. In 1912 and 1913, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania heard testimonies from both MPPC members, such as Siegmund Lubin, and "Independents" who later became Hollywood moguls, such as William Fox. Ultimately, in 1915, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the MPPC in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and spelled the end for the already weakening MPPC. -- Eric Hoyt, 2012
Date Added:
September 21, 2023
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.

2510 Petitioner's Exhibit No. 263. 1 manufacturers; Italian Ones, Williamson & Co., London, and Williams, Brown & Earl, who import certain other lines of English films. "As the bearing of these patent claims is of the utmost importance, and appears to be so slightly understood, not ouhT by the rental exchanges but by the exhibitors as well, I will attempt to explain the situation as briefly as possible, as I understand it. Edison Patents Litigation. 2 "Mr. Edison received letters patent No. 589,168 on Aug. 31, 1897, covering moving picture cameras and films. Litigation ensued between himself and the Biograph company, the latter being made defendants as infringers of this patent. The question was fought through the courts during an extended period, and the final decision upon this patent was rendered by the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals on March 10, 1902, by Judges Wallace, Lacombe and Townsend, disallowing the Edison claims in toto. "The court stated in effect that application should have been made to cover the specific apparatus used by Edison, 3 and that the attempt to cover the entire moving picture art, broadly, could not stand. "Edison then applied at the patent office for a re-issue, dividing his original claim into two applications for patents, one of them covering his specific type of moving picture camera, and the other covering motion picture films. Letters patent No. 13,037 were granted thereon, Sept. 30, 1902. "Suits were then brought against the Biograph company and others for infringement of the camera claim, and these were strenuously defended for the Biograph com^ pany by Messrs. Kerr, Page & Cooper, whom I consider the most thoroughly informed firm of patent attorneys on moving picture matters in the United States. Decision Applied to Camera, Only. "This litigation passed through the lower and the higher courts, and a decision was rendered early in 1907. In order to understand the question properly it must be emphasized that this decision applied to the camera only,