Every citizen should be taught the history of anti-trust and labor law in the United States. These events have already unfolded in our past. Their consequences

Every citizen should be taught the history of anti-trust and labor law in the United States. These events have already unfolded in our past. Their consequences have already been dealt with by American society in 1946 - 1948. In two landmark anti-trust cases, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. and Bigelow v. RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. The first one is more famous, but the second one is directly applicable as it dealt with the inverse of Disney's current modus operandi - the restriction of first-time screenings to theaters owned by the studio, The gist of the complaint was that, by reason of an unlawful conspiracy of the respondents, petitioners were prevented from securing pictures -for exhibition in their theatre until after the preferred exhibitors had been able to show them in earlier and more desirable runs, and that petitioners were thus discriminated against in the distribution of feature films in favor of competing theatres owned or controlled by some of the respondents. The matter before the court was the lower courts judgement and the damages awared to the petitioner. The lower court had found that an unlawful conspiracy existed and used a rough approximation to derive the damages, ...evidence was introduced in the course of the trial tending to show that respondents conspired to maintain the release system as part of a conspiracy to maintain minimum admission prices to be charged by exhibitors generally. This proof indicated that the object of this conspiracy was to make it possible to maintain high admission prices in the Loop theatres by restricting the price competition of the subsequent-run theatres. The distributors' contracts with the Loop theatres provided for film rentals based on a percentage of the admission fees collected. It appeared that the rental contracts entered into between respondent distributors and the Chicago exhibitors, including respondent exhibitors and petitioners, uniformly contained schedules of minimum admission prices fixed on the basis of the playing position assigned. There was thus evidence tending to show that the release system and the price-fixing system were each an integral part of an unlawful conspiracy to give to the Loop theatres the advantages of a first-run protected from low-price competition. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this as being too vague, but the Supreme Court reversed this decision because, ...it is impossible to establish any measure of damage, because the unlawful system which respondents have created has precluded petitioners from showing that other conditions affecting profits would have continued without change unfavorable to them during the critical period if that system had not been established, and petitioners had conducted their business in a free competitive market. - http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep327/usrep327251/usrep327251.pdf Disney should be held to the same standard. They have caused irreparable harm to the industry through their predatory actions and monopolistic behavior. A future where Disney controls the entertainment industry is a future without a free, fair and functioning market.