NBC v. Transradio

In 1931 there was a prize fight between Jack Sharkey and Mickey Walker in a baseball park in Brooklyn. The promoters sold exclusive motion picture rights to Rudolph Mayer Pictures. Inc. Pathe News, Inc. installed a camera on a nearby building and made movies of the fight. New York's courts refused to allow Pathe. to distribute or exhibit their films, upheld the exclusive contract of Mayer Pictures.

This week a comparable legal question involving radio broadcasting arose in connection with the Joe Louis-Tommy Farr fight at Manhattan's Yankee Stadium. Buick Motors bought the exclusive broadcasting rights to the fight for $35,000. Transradio Press Service, Inc. and Radio News Association, Inc. whose business is supplying radio stations with news for broadcasting, announced that they would furnish running accounts of the fight for $10 per radio station. Buick's advertising agency, NBC whose network was being used by Buick, the fight promoters and the fighters went to court asking $100,000 damages and an injunction. Judge Ferdinand Pecora, onetime inquisitor for the U. S. Senate, heard the case, granted an injunction prohibiting Transradio from carrying through its proposed plan of using the Buick broadcast for "tips" and getting its facts by spyglassing over the ball-park fence.

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