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Edison assembled representatives of the nation’s biggest movie companies—Biograph, Vitagraph, American Mutoscope, and seven others—and invited them to sign a monopolistic peace treaty. Since 1891, when the Wizard of Menlo Park filed his first patent on a motion picture camera/film system, his lawyers had launched 23 aggressive infringement suits against other production outfits.

Sometimes Edison won. Sometimes he lost. But the costs of these battles overwhelmed his rivals, and that was the intent.

“The expense of these suits would have financially ruined any inventor who did not have the large resources of Edison,” one of his lawyers boasted, “and it could hardly be expected that he would be able to prosecute simultaneously every infringement as it arose.”

Thus his victims sold their patents, making the Edison movie empire ever larger.

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.

For HIST-155– TR era