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 6
Leaf #:
000542
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 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.

3394 Gov't Ex. 277, Decision on Latham Patent. paratus capable of continuously projecting or exhibiting upon a suitable surface a great number of pictures taken from moving objects and arranged upon a strip of film of great length, whereby each picture in the strip is brought to rest at the moment of projection, so that there is given to the eye an impression of objects in motion, in a manner now well understood. "In an apparatus organized so that the picturebearing strip is caused to move continuously and uninterruptedly across the optical axis a light of very high intensity is necessary to give satisfactory results; but a light of such power is not required for satisfactory projection by means of an apparatus embodying the principle of the present invention. The stoppage of each picture during its exposure permits the requisite quantity of light to pass through the condenser, the picture, and the objective to the screen or plane surface upon which the image is projected when the light employed is only of a moderately high power. "The invention therefore consists in an apparatus for projecting successively a large number of pictures of moving objects, embodying, among other things, means for bringing each picture to rest at the moment of projection, means for reducing the strain the picture-film would otherwise suffer from the rapid interruption and renewal of its movement, and means for maintaining uniformity of movement of the film as it unwinds from the delivering reel, and as it winds upon the receiving reel, all as set forth in the claims at the end of this specification." The claims involved are the first, third, fifth, and eighth. They relate to the film-feeding mechanism, and are as follows : "(1) The combination with devices for supporting the bulk of a flexible film before and after exposure, of feeding mechanisms located between the devices for supporting the film and separate and distinct therefrom, one of said feeding mechanisms being constructed to uniformly feed the film and produce a