May 13, 1898, Thomas Edison sued the American Mutoscope Company claiming the studio infringed on his patent for the Kinetograph Camera.
By this time in his career Edison had already invented the Phonograph or Speaking Machine, the Electric-Lamp and other important technologies. In 1887 he moved his Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory to Orange, New Jersey and handed over the development of a machine that could capture moving images to his assistant W.L.K Dickson. Dickson helped design the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope and Edison publicly demonstrated the machines in 1891.
Edison recognized financial drawbacks to the format and style to the cameras Dickson designed so he acquired the rights to a camera called the Vitascope developed by his other assistants, C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Dickson secretly went on to help Edison’s competitors develop a similar motion-picture device, which later came to be known as the Mutoscope, in doing this Dickson was fired by Edison.
Dickson ventured out to found a movie company called American Mutoscope (later renamed American Mutoscope and Biograph, then renamed Biograph). In the lawsuit filed in May 1898, Edison accused American Mutoscope of stealing his work. In 1902, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Edison did not invent the motion-picture device, but allowed that he had invented a specific section of the camera, the sprocket system.
Edison didn’t let this set him back, he went on to join forces with filmmakers to create Motion Pictures Patents Corp., an organization devoted to protecting patents and stopping others from entering the film industry. The organization was later deemed an unfair monopoly by the courts and in 1917 the Supreme Court dissolved their trust.
