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:

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:
1913
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 1
Leaf #:
000201
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:
May 23, 2024
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Opinion on Reissue 12,192. IT!) "175XQ. Why do you suppose you did not refer in any of your caveats to the character or composition of material of the film which you used in any of the forms of apparatus for taking or reproducing photographs of an object in motion? A. I don't know why I did not. I was not interested in the manufacturing or making of the photographic material. 176XQ. Did you not regard the film then as a thing of your invention? A. No, I did not regard the film as a part of my invention, no sir; I looked to the people who made it for that. 177XQ. You consider your invention to be in the apparatus which you had designed for producing the illusion of motion? A. I was trying to do for the eye what the phonograph was doing for the ear, and to make it commercial. 178XQ. After you had conceived of that idea, the selection of material was not a matter of invention, although it might have been difficult? A. Well, I don't know about that. Our experiments showed that we had to have peculiar material, especially when we were on the microphotographs, as we could not get any definition with paper and thinks like that; we had to get some glassy surface. The microphotographs shown with microscopes are very nicely defined and even a hundred figures are shown under a microscope, and all the details come out sharp, but these are taken by some means that I don't know of, but taken at very low speed, and the surface seems to be perfect, whereas the only surface we could get was very warty and irregular, and we could not bring out any details whatever when the picture was extremely small * * *. 183Re-DQ. On cross examination you referred to the requisities of the film for your 1889 apparatus as being toughness and transparency. Did you include the requisite for the surface, the sensitive surface of such a film? A. No, I did not, but that was one of the things that we got the photograph people to work on to give us the maximum sensibility, because we were very short of light, and as we Avere taking photographs at a very rapid rate, we had to have something extremely sensitive, and they made us a special film, different from the film that we printed on, that is to say different from the positives, and