. . .
But the old man wanted it all, so he assembled his rivals and proposed that they join his Motion Picture Patents Company. It would function as a holding operation for the participants' collective patents—sixteen all told, covering projectors, cameras, and film stock. MPPC would issue licenses and collect royalties from movie producers, distributors, and exhibitors.
To top it all off, MPPC convinced the Eastman Kodak company to refuse to sell raw film stock to anyone but Patent Company licensees, a move designed to shut French and German footage out of the country.
"The negotiations were finalized in December," Gabler notes, and by early January, "the company made its announcement that the old laissez faire of the movie business was being abruptly terminated."
Make no mistake, had Thomas Edison succeeded in this scheme, he would have killed the motion picture industry or at least delayed its flowering by a generation. The good news is that the Patents Company foundered for a couple of years, then was declared in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by a federal court.
But why did MPCC fail even before its legal demise? We have here an object lesson that the Internet empires of our time ought to consider. In essence, Edison's forces thought that they could dominate their industry via legal control over technology, in tandem with a cynical alliance with morals groups. Giving the public the kind of movies that it really wanted came last on their list of priorities—which was the cause of the Edison Trust's downfall.
Read on . . .
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/thomas-edisons-plot-to-d...
Comments
That is an Interesting article Jason,
Edison justified this rigid system as a form of moral quality control. "In my opinion, nothing is of greater importance to the success of the motion picture interests than films of good moral tone," he declared. These remarks pandered to a veritable army of decency reformers, furious that immigrants (who many of them disliked) were enjoying movies without being properly supervised (by them).
Bluebloods occasionally made forays into urban nickelodeons—mostly for the purpose of writing outraged commentaries like this:
The audience also sat still for one or two high-class films without any fuss, although we are sure they didn't understand what they were looking at any more than they would a Chinese opera. ... I would have been more comfortable on board a cattle train than where I sat. There were five hundred smells combined in one. One young lady fainted and had to be carried out of the theater. I can forgive that, all right, as people with sensitive noses should not go slumming. But what is hardest to swallow is that the tastes of this seething mass of human cattle are the tastes that have dominated, or at least set, the standard of American moving pictures.
Patents Company statements assured the public that General Film stood as a barrier against "cheap and inferior foreign films" (especially of French variety) and that its distributors served the "better classes" of the community. The cartel insisted that it was fully in sync with the National Board of Censorship, a coalition of state level film monitoring groups whose activities the Supreme Court would sanction in a crucial 1915 court case, Mutual Film Co. versus the Industrial Commission of Ohio.
That ruling declared that the content regulation of movies did not violate the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, and it would not be reversed for more than 35 years.
btw, Edison blew it in consideration of time pieces [watches], since he surmised then that time was of little concern and there would be no market for knowing what time it was. Agrarian cultures needed a rooster, and the sun. Train conductors were the only ones needing to know.
"Does anybody really know what time it is?" Guess Who
The Comstock Law of 1873 was a federal law that made it a crime to sell or distribute materials that could be used for contraception or
ABORTION, to send such materials or information about such materials through the federal mail system, or to import such materials from abroad. It was motivated by growing societal concerns over OBSCENITY, abortion, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, the institution of marriage, the changing role of women in society, and increased procreation by the lower classes. Following the bloodbath of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, many Americans sought a return to simpler times, while other Americans yearned for a nationwide spiritual and moral revival.
Read more: Comstock Law of (1873) - Court, Materials, Women, Abortion, Federal, and Supreme http://law.jrank.org/pages/5508/Comstock-Law-1873.html#ixzz0yfgnARWB