Berkey Photo, Inc. v. Eastman Kodak Co.

457 F. Supp. 404, 1978 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16118
CourtDistrict Court, S.D. New York
DecidedAugust 8, 1978
Docket73 Civ. 424(MEF)
StatusPublished
Cited by16 cases

This text of 457 F. Supp. 404 (Berkey Photo, Inc. v. Eastman Kodak Co.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, S.D. New York primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Berkey Photo, Inc. v. Eastman Kodak Co., 457 F. Supp. 404, 1978 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16118 (S.D.N.Y. 1978).

Opinion

MEMORANDUM ON POST-TRIAL MOTIONS

FRANKEL, District Judge.

Defendant has moved under F.R.Civ.P. 50(b) for judgment notwithstanding the jury’s verdicts. Plaintiff has moved for numerous and detailed kinds of injunctive relief, including some divestitures, provisions for predisclosure, and various restrictions on Kodak’s business procedures and practices. It is convenient to treat both motions together and to record some pertinent observations on both in this single memorandum.

I. DEFENDANT’S MOTION FOR JUDGMENT N.O.V. 1

Many of the issues canvassed in the briefs on this motion were considered at length during the trial, in conversations on the record, and the resolutions reached by the court are largely reflected in the charges to the jury. It does not seem useful for nisi prius purposes to rehearse all the problems again in this writing. Nor is it necessary to discuss the legal standard, not in dispute, for granting judgment notwithstanding the verdict. See National Auto Brokers Corp. v. General Motors Corp., 572 F.2d 953, at 956 (2d Cir. 1978). Accordingly, as to the portions of defendant’s motion which are being denied, the court will limit its observations herein to a relatively few matters of possible further interest. On the claims, with respect to which the motion is being granted, the result of which will be to reduce the total award from $37,620,130 to $27,154,700, the court will of course state the reasons why the jury’s verdict is found now to be vulnerable to this extent.

110 Cameras

The largest single item of damages awarded by the jury was for Berkey’s lost profits, $15,250,000, resulting from Kodak’s unlawful monopolization and attempt to monopolize the amateur camera market. The predominant part of the evidence supporting this claim dealt with the introduction of the 110 camera line as part of a system of interdependent photographic products, without prior disclosure to competing camera manufacturers of the information about the new Kodacolor II film format that would have enabled these other manufacturers to enter the market at about the same time as, and compete on the merits with, Kodak’s initial line of 110 cameras.

For the most part, defendant’s contentions on this score, as it observes, retrace ground plowed earlier in denying defendant’s motion for summary judgment and formulating the charge to the jury. This reflects a superficially bemusing situation: that despite the length of the trial, the basic historical facts on this, as on many aspects of the case, are not in significant dispute. Without recounting these facts in detail, we may note that the jury undoubtedly found that defendant resolved some years before the 110 introduction to introduce the new camera and film, made to work with each other, and designed to displace with overwhelming suddenness huge segments of the market for 126 cameras. Defendant’s responsible executives determined that the simultaneity of these introductions was to be the key weapon against competitors, brushing aside technical objections that the new film was unsatisfactory, *411 inferior to the predecessor Kodacolor X in vital respects, and requiring further research and development to become a satisfactory product. The paramount strategy and goal were thus to use the film monopoly — Kodak’s power in a field where its market share consistently exceeded 80% — as a lever for suddenly swelling defendant’s power in the camera market, achieving there at least a temporary total monopoly of a vital new segment to be created by the system introduction. Some “responsible persons” within Kodak urged unsuccessfully that predisclosure concerning the new film format be given to camera competitors (as well as photofinishers and photofinishing equipment makers) so that they would not suffer in one blow the instant obsolescence of inventories and work in progress and the inability to compete at all with their cameras in the terrain of the newly announced system. The 110 announcement came substantially as a surprise, following some minimal predisclosures, for a price, two or three months earlier. And these events, it is worth mentioning, followed hard after a magicube coup in June of 1970, when Kodak gained a similar advantage of surprise and temporary exclusivity from what the jury found, and the court entirely agrees, was an unlawful combination in restraint of trade with Sylvania.

Without dwelling further on the facts of a huge record leading to the jury’s award, the court refers briefly to some recurrent arguments defendant has pressed on this subject and sketches the reasons why they have been, and are once again, rejected.

1. The claim of immunity per se for product introductions

Throughout the case, defendant has urged, and it urges once more, that a company’s introduction of a new product— though the company be a huge one like Kodak with monopoly power in a mosaic of interconnected markets, and though the introduction be designed deliberately to employ monopoly power in one market to create or enhance such power in another— must “as a matter of law” be immune from attack under the antitrust laws. If this is sound law, defendant should indeed be relieved of the verdict with respect to 110 camera damages. The court remains persuaded, however, that there is no such enclave for “product introductions,” and that the mode, purpose, and impact of product introductions may, as in this case, play central parts in findings of unlawful monopolization and attempts to monopolize, no less than other, ordinarily lawful and “normal” business activities like leasing rather than selling machinery, United States v. United Shoe Machinery Co., 110 P.Supp. 295, 344 (D.Mass.1953), aff’d per curiam 347 U.S. 521, 74 S.Ct. 699, 98 L.Ed. 910 (1954), the creation of useful resources for added productive capacity, United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, 148 F.2d 416, 430-31 (2d Cir. 1945), or the discount offered on used equipment and the adoption of separate charges for separate services condemned as exclusionary in Greyhound Computer Corp. v. International Business Machines Corp., 559 F.2d 488, 499-503 (9th Cir. 1977), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 1040, 98 S.Ct. 782, 54 L.Ed.2d 790 (1978).

Before United Shoe and Alcoa, arguments similar to Kodak’s could have been mounted with respect to the practices of defendants there involved — leasing, building capacity, etc. Indeed, they were made. Thus, in the United Shoe case, seeking reversal of Judge Wyzanski’s historic ruling, the appellant company accepted the restrictions the Alcoa case had placed upon it as a dominant firm but assailed bitterly the notion that leasing of machinery could be the basis for a judgment against it. ' United Shoe complained of being condemned for its decision merely “to continue a business policy which it found in existence at its birth.” 2 It noted that this was “the policy of its more important American competitors,” 3 *412

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Bluebook (online)
457 F. Supp. 404, 1978 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 16118, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/berkey-photo-inc-v-eastman-kodak-co-nysd-1978.