Had always heard this. Perhaps it is just urban legend.
The early twentieth century movie industry, which was thriving in New Jersey, relocated to California to elude the Edison movie camera patent enforcement officers, who collected fees from anyone making a film,
Do not see how this would work. Presumably they would release the movies and they would eventually get back to New Jersey where Edison's team could learn of their existence. How are you gonna sneak a movie past them if you have to show it to the public?
Don't really see how moving to California would prevent legal action against them in Federal court. I would also expect a federal judge would award huge punitive damages for a company trying such a tactic.
Nope, not an urban legend. The exploits of the Motion Picture Patents Company (formerly the Edison trust) are well-documented.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Edison owned nearly every motion picture camera patent in America. His MPPC “licensed” seven or eight companies to use his cameras. Everyone else was shut out. And they had courts on their side. Hired MPPC thugs would go to shoots of independent producers and break stuff and rough people up. Some producers/camera operators resorted to building false camera housings from wood and pasteboard to disguise equipment.
So the independents fled to California, as far from the goon squads as possible. They were aided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which had jurisdiction, but which for some reason didn’t enforce the East Coast court patent rulings.
Certainly it was providential that California had good weather for outdoor shooting, and varied topography that could stand in for anyplace in the word, which made California a better locale than New Jersey... but that was a happy coincidence.
The founders of Hollywood were fleeing the Edison patent police.