These are appeals from a decree awarding an injunction against violations of §§ 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, as amended, and § 3 of the Clayton Act. Two questions are presented. Were violations proved? If so, are the provisions of the decree right?
The complaint named as defendants 12 corporations and 101 individuals associated with them as officers or directors. It was dismissed as to 3 corporations and 40 individuals. The corporations are the leaders in automatic glass-making machinery and in the glassware industry. The charge is that all the defendants agreed, conspired, and combined to monopolize, and did monopolize and restrain interstate and foreign commerce by acquiring patents covering the manufacture of glass-making machinery, and by excluding others from a fair opportunity freely to engage in commerce in such machinery and in the manufacture and distribution of glass products. The gravamen of the case is that the defendants have cooperated in obtaining and licensing patents covering glass-making machinery, have limited and restricted the use of the patented machinery by a network of agreements, and have maintained prices for unpatented glassware.
The trial lasted 112 days. The court filed an opinion of 160 pages, 628 findings of fact and 89 conclusions of law, and entered a decree covering 46 printed pages and comprising 60 numbered paragraphs. The printed record contains over 16,500 pages. An opinion of reasonable length must deal in summary fashion with the facts disclosed by the proofs and leave much of the detailed history of the transactions to be gleaned from the opinion below.
In 1912 Hartford-Fairmont Company was organized to combine the activities of two existing companies interested in glass manufacture with those of a group of engineers who desired to obtain and exploit patents for automatic glass-making machinery. The defendant Corning Glass Works was, at that time, engaged primarily in the production and distribution of incandescent bulbs, sign and optical ware, heat-resisting ware and other specialty glassware. Its field may be defined roughly as the pressed and blown field, or the noncontainer field. It has not made, and does not now make, containers save a limited amount of tumblers. In 1909 persons interested in Corning organized Empire Machine Company as a patent holding and developing company.
The defendant Owens-Illinois Glass Company (hereafter called Owens) is a large manufacturer of glass. Mr. Owens of that company produced the first fully automatic machine for blowing bottles, which is known as a suction type machine. He was interested in companies engaged in developing and manufacturing this type of machine and exercising the rights represented by the Owens and related patents. From about 1904 the Owens group followed the policy of granting exclusive licenses, in limited fields, for the manufacture of glass-ware by the suction process. Owens itself was, and is, mainly interested in what is known as narrow neck container ware. Prior to the Owens inventions glass making had been largely a hand process. Thereafter, due to Owens' restrictive licensing policy, many glass manufacturers were threatened with extinction unless some other competing machine could be devised. Ultimately a process, called suspended gob feeding, was invented, which was more economical for certain ware than the suction process, and could be applied in the manufacture of diversified glassware. The introduction of the gob feeder machine threatened Owens' domination of the glass machinery field and Owens, in self-protection, obtained patents and patent rights on gob feeders and licensed some companies for their use.
Hartford-Fairmont was interested in the development of the gob feeder. It applied for some patents and acquired others. In the meantime, it licensed gob feeder machinery, as Owens had done with the suction machine, by restricting its use to the manufacture of specified ware. Empire owned certain patent applications which were in interference with Hartford-Fairmont gob feeder applications.