Vitagraph Company of America

“ Magazines and periodicals of all classes are watched with care and as soon as extensive publicity campaigns are launched in the United States or Europe, the chances are that the trade name of the article being exploited will be simultaneously registered by a native in many Latin American Patent Offices. ”

“ The great American printing houses of today are more and more the masters of their own craft, not the imitators of others. This condition is also true of the type founders and manufacturers of machines and materials used in the industry. The sentiment of independence is bound to become more marked, and the originality of American printing more pronounced, with the development of a generation of better printers. ”

“ Selling archived copies of articles is a big business for journal publishers. One of the largest is Springer, a Germany-based company that publishes about 2,500 journals, with about 330 of them open-access. ”

“ The powers of the Company were used much more for the regulation and control of printing than for the 26improvement of the art. It was to the Company that the government looked particularly for the enforcement of the statutes regarding printing. For that reason, if a book were of doubtful character and liable to be prohibited the publisher preferred to run the chance of attempting to evade the regulation regarding registration. Fortunately the registers of the Company containing the records of all their transactions are for the most part still in existence. ”

“ A machine styled a rotary mimeograph was covered by a patent. The claims of the patent, however, did not embrace the ink or other materials used in working the machine, nor were they covered by independent patents. The Dick Company, owner of the patent, sold one of the machines to a Miss Skou. ”

“ American imprints seeking to promote the English patent medicines were certainly rare. The most significant example may be found in the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine.47 In 1731 James Wallace, a New York merchant, became American agent for the sale of Dr. Bateman's Pectoral Drops. To help him with his new venture, Wallace took a copy of the London promotional pamphlet to a New York printer to be reproduced. ”

“ It was also, although this purpose was probably secondary, intended to protect England from foreign competition. The name of the printer, the author, and the publisher, and the place of publication and sale were to be placed 41in every book. No person was permitted to erect a printing press or to let any premises for the purpose of carrying on printing without first giving notice to the Company, and no carpenter was permitted to make a press without similar notice.
The number of master printers was limited to twenty. Every master printer had to give a bond of £300 for good behavior. ”

“ The printers had been gradually deprived of any shares in new publications; they had been thrown out of all copyright, and probably had grown somewhat jealous of their prosperous masters; the printers complained that they were nothing else than slaves to the booksellers. They called for an independent company of “the mystery,” and reverting to the custom of the early printers, they desired to have their own presses under their own management, and to print only the copies of which they themselves were the proprietors. ”

“ Without in any degree changing, we rearrange and somewhat condense the case as stated in the certificate. The American Graphophone Company, a West Virginia corporation, as assignee of certain letters patent of the United States was the sole manufacturer of Columbia graphophones, grafonolas, records and blanks, and the Columbia Graphophone Company, also a West Virginia corporation, was the general agent of the American Company for the purpose of marketing the devices above stated. ”

“ Curiously enough American printers have never taken kindly to French type faces although many of them, from Garamond down, are very beautiful. Some of the French types designed, not far from 1875, seem to have become Americanized and are among the most legible and beautiful in use, but the American printers have never been very willing to use them. Whatever the reason, the Franklin foundry was added to the list of unsuccessful attempts at type founding. ”

“ They alleged that the Company 45of Stationers was controlled by the booksellers and that they cheapened printing and impoverished the printers, that the Company of Stationers was so large that only old men could attain to the dignity of masters or wardens, and that only once in ten or twelve years was it possible for a journeyman printer to become a master printer. They claimed that a new Company would free the printing industry from these shackles, that it would improve the quality of printing, and that it would secure for the government better supervision of the output of the press. ”

“ Very well, sir: we hope you will treasure them up. You say truly when you remark, that the printing done in this room is seldom, if ever, surpassed in America. We know that; and we intend to stand on the topmost round of the typographical ladder, and to show our fellow-artists what can be done with type such as we manufacture.
We are afraid, Mr. Typograph, that your long excursion over the house has wearied you. Let us go down-stairs again. These, sir, are our warerooms. ”

“ The beginning of the industry in America was almost coincident with the granting of patents for the manufacture of paper in England. A paper-mill was established by William Rittenhouse, a native of Holland, at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the year 1690, one of the builders and owners being William Bradford, a Philadelphia printer, who was afterward the owner of30 the first printing office in New York City. It was through him that Benjamin Franklin, in 1723, received his first introduction to a temporary home, and employment, in Philadelphia. ”

“ Americans have always been a newspaper-loving people, and after the independence of the colonies the founding of new newspapers went on apace. It must not be forgotten that all printing in the early days of the last century was done with foundry type, hand set. The demand 19for type, therefore, was not only large, but was increasing. Up to the outbreak of the war of 1812 the few type foundries in America were regularly from three to four months behind their orders, so greatly did demand outrun production. ”

“ For many years the only comprehensive summaries of American Manufactures were a German work by Fleischmann, On the Branches of American Industry, to which was subsequently added Whitworth and Wallis's Report—drawn up for the British government, and Freedley's Philadelphia Manufactures—to which we should in justice add the invaluable series of Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, and the Patent Office Reports. The community needs more, however, than books can furnish. It requires the constant accumulation and dissemination of technological knowledge of every kind. ”

“ About seventy-six of these companies still continue to exist. They survive mainly for charitable and philanthropic purposes, conserving and administering the large funds which were accumulated in early centuries.
The Stationers’ Company was organized in 1557 partly because the printers saw the necessity for organization and regulation of the industry, and partly because the crown desired a better means for controlling printing than had theretofore existed. ”

“ The archivists and the technical groups involved insist that regulating access to the digital resources, as well as how to best organise these corpora, is not their responsibility, but that it remains that of the researchers in close cooperation with representatives of those who contributed to the data corpus. While this initially promises a new and wider scope for providing and sharing data with communities, it also creates some enduring problems for the researchers involved. Archiving technology is indeed changing in some fundamental ways how we generate and share knowledge. ”

“ However, as I have argued elsewhere (Widlok 2010) , the new electronic archives are not simply a quantitative extension of existing modes of data collection, but they qualitatively alter the relationship between researchers and their products and, as a consequence, also the relations between the researched and these products and the relationship between researchers and their partners in the field. The new possibilities of Internet-based digital archiving and online databases are much more than "just technical" innovations. ”

“ Both profit margins were significantly higher than the company average and both were earned primarily in the $6 billion U.S. legal database market, a market which is thriving without strong intellectual property protection over databases. (First rule of thumb for regulators: when someone with a profit margin over 20 percent asks you for additional monopoly protection, pause before agreeing.) ”

“ The trouble there is that the author of that section supposed that the lithographic process was the only other process of producing a book besides printing it from type or a streotyped plate. Now, the lithographic process is not the only process. There are modern processes of photomechanical printing that have nothing at all to do with lithography, that are much cheaper than lithography, and that do all that lithography does. As an illustration, those beautiful illustrated supplements that come out every week with the New York Tribune on Sunday are supposed by some gentlemen to be lithographs. ”

“ Each publication has been compiled by a competent author or group of authors, and carefully edited, the purpose being to provide the printers of the United States—employers, journeymen, and apprentices—with a comprehensive series of handy and inexpensive compendiums of reliable, up-to-date information upon the various branches and specialties of the printing craft, all arranged in orderly fashion for progressive study. ”

“ Our industry has shared in this increase of foreign trade, but not to the extent that it ought. Our own markets being the best in the world, manufacturers in past years have naturally confined their efforts practically to them, but we have reached such proportions in our ability to manufacture all kinds of paper that it seems as though there was never a more opportune time to explore and make conquest of the foreign paper market. ”

“ Thomas Vautrollier, a stranger, was allowed to print all Latin books except the Grammars, which were given to Thomas Marsh, and John Day had received the right of printing and selling the A B C and Litell Catechism, a book largely bought for schools, and which Christopher Barker, in his Complaint, declared was once [Pg 98] 'the onelye reliefe of the porest sort of that Company.' On every side the best work was seized and monopolised. Nor did the evil cease there. These patents were invariably granted for life with reversion to a successor, and they were bought and sold freely. ”

“ Originally these owners were generally the printers because the printers and publishers, as has just been pointed out, were 55the same. Later, as the ascendency of the booksellers increased, it was they who held the manuscripts. Sometimes due regard was paid to the rights of the author and sometimes not. This appears to have depended entirely upon the arrangements which author and publisher were able to make. In many cases the author got decidedly the worst of the bargain. The protection which the Company undertook to extend was limited to the holder of the copyright. ”

“ If the attempt were made to give in detail the story of American type founding and the accomplishments of the notable American type founders, and at the same time to chronicle the improvements and inventions which American genius has contributed to the machines and processes used in printing and the allied industries, a very large book might readily be produced. ”

“ The argument here is, that a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author. Under the acts of Congress designed to give effect to this section, the persons who are to be benefited and divided into two classes, authors and inventors. The monopoly which is granted to the former is called a copyright, that given to the latter, letters patent, or, in the familiar language of the present day, patent right. ”

“ An inevitable trade-off in this development is that researchers partly lose control over the end product and, potentially, so do their informants. The researcher may be able to discuss publications with informants before they get printed, and will seek consent before things are recorded and put into an archive, but there is no way that a constantly growing and changing body of data that is subject to collective work and revision could be controlled in the same way. ”

“ It contained merely the register of an idea, and that was all.’ The scheme was never in practical operation; but Bennet Woodcroft, in his introductory chapter to ‘Patents for Inventions in Printing,’ credits Nicholson's patent with producing ‘an entire revolution in the mechanism of the art.’ It was not until seventeen years afterwards that Friedrich König consulted Nicholson as a patent agent about registering his invention of a cylinder printing press for newspapers. ”

“ Arrived in this country, he worked for some time at his trade. The turning point in his career came in 1876 when he was engaged as an expert mechanic to work on the development of a typewriter transfer machine in which a group of people were interested. His work on this machine, although long continued, was not successful, but his study and experimentation led him to conceive the idea of a type-casting machine which should be controlled from a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter, but larger on account of the greater number of characters necessary. ”