Ars Tecnica: "Thomas Edison's plot to hijack the movie industry"
Interessante lezione dal passato. juan carlos Thomas Edison's plot to hijack the movie industry By Matthew Lasar <http://arstechnica.com/author/matthew-lasar/> | Last updated about 11 hours ago It was a dark and stormy night on December 18, 1908. Okay---maybe it wasn't so dark and stormy. But it should have been, because that was the night Thomas Edison tried to hijack the motion picture industry. "With his beetle brows, long wispy hair, and beatific look, Edison might have seemed the addled inventor," writes the historian Neil Gabler, "but he was a shrewd businessman and a fearsome adversary who was never loath to take credit for any invention, whether he was responsible or not." 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 large. [...] Continua qui: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/thomas-edisons-plot-to-destr...
In effetti l'articolo non pone particolare accento sulla cosa, ma la nascita di Hollywood in California è dovuto tanto al clima e all'accesso economico a vasti terreni, quanto alla sua conveniente distanza da New York e gli avvocati di Edison... David Orban skype, twitter, linkedin, sl, etc: davidorban On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 5:16 PM, J.C. DE MARTIN <demartin@polito.it> wrote:
Interessante lezione dal passato.
juan carlos
Thomas Edison's plot to hijack the movie industry
By Matthew Lasar | Last updated about 11 hours ago
It was a dark and stormy night on December 18, 1908. Okay—maybe it wasn't so dark and stormy. But it should have been, because that was the night Thomas Edison tried to hijack the motion picture industry.
"With his beetle brows, long wispy hair, and beatific look, Edison might have seemed the addled inventor," writes the historian Neil Gabler, "but he was a shrewd businessman and a fearsome adversary who was never loath to take credit for any invention, whether he was responsible or not."
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 large.
[...] Continua qui: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/thomas-edisons-plot-to-destr...
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J.C. DE MARTIN