"Loss, Damage, Injury"

Last week William Fox, that bald and beady-eyed onetime magnifico of cinema, sprang at his adversaries in eleven directions at once. Alleging ''great and irreparable loss, damage and injury," he entered suit in Manhattan for injunction and accounting of profits against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp., M-G-M Distributing Corp., Columbia Pictures Corp., Consolidated Film Industries Inc., First Division Pictures Inc., Universal Pictures Corp., Monogram Picture Corp., Reliance Picture Corp., Talking Picture Epics Inc., Twentieth Century Pictures Inc., and Ameranglo Corp.

A foundation for these suits had been provided by the U. S. Supreme Court fortnight ago when it refused to review a lower court ruling and thus, in effect, sustained Mr. Fox's claim that every user of R. C. A. Photophone and Western Electric sound-equipment was infringing on patents owned by his personal holding company (TIME, Oct. 22). Estimates of the extent to which sanguine Mr. Fox thought he was damaged ranged around $100,000,000. With Mr. Fox out in the open and trying to stage a mighty comeback, spokesmen for the film industry hastened to point out the weaknesses of his position.

The Supreme Court had not actually awarded him any damages, or said that his patents were infringed, or ruled that Mr. Fox's company owned the patents. In fact, Fox Film Corp. was contending that the man who in 1930 had lost control of that company had bought the Tri-Ergon patents abroad with $45,000 of Fox Film money and hence had no right to them. And finally it was argued that the "double print" and "sprocket" processes for recording and reproducing sound--the prime points of dispute--were not entirely fundamental and could be circumvented by smart sound-engineers by the time the smoke of litigation cleared. Nevertheless no one denied that R. C. A. Photophone and Western Electric's Electrical Research Products were holding conferences behind locked doors, or that the latter found it necessary to reassure exhibitors that they would be protected according to contract from having to pay damages or that Mr. Fox was making more commotion within the cinema industry than it had experienced in many a year.

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