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)

Page scan 00084 from 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 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 #:
00084
Language:
English
Collection:
Government & Law and Early Cinema
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 12, 2024
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.

2534 Petitioner's Exhibit No. 256. if these were the only improvements brought about by the Association, I would consider them of value, and the public will undoubtedly appreciate them. Merely a Coincidence. "It is merely a coincidence that W. E. Gilmore and Frank L. Dyer, both of the Edison Company, made the trip to Chicago at the same time. Our presence was quickly heralded and created quite a panic among the infringers of the Edison patents. All sorts of false reports were circulated during my short stay in the western city, and a representative of the foreign manufacturers even remarked that he had to work every night right up to two o'clock to prepare statements for the morning press. "I admit that the opposition has won out in two different ways. First, the foreign manufacturers have been successful in getting rid in a short time of nearly the whole enormous quantity of old films, considered as valueless, that have been on their shelves for the past year. I do not know how the 'Independents' (I suppose they took this name as they realized that they cannot depend on anything) will like this. In fact, it would surprise me very much if they stood for this sort of business very long, as I know there are many intelligent men among them. The second success of the opposition is to have permitted each customer to select what pleases him and not to oblige anyone to give a standing order. But these clever foreign manufacturers omitted to add that it would have been impossible for them to obtain standing orders from their customers, for the simple reason that having combined together they would compel their customers to take the whole lot; I doubt whether such a customer could be found. "Besides the two successes mentioned, the foreign manufacturers enjoy also another advantage, which must not be overlooked. They rent their lucky customers all the films that remain on their hands on account of being too poor a quality to sell. (In fact, I agree with them that this was the only resource when standing orders were not enforced.) "These gentlemen of the opposition are really very clever; they even revive old patents.