against the Kleine Optical Company, which had produced the copies of the film for Kalem's distributors. The case was initially decided against Kalem, the primary defendant, in May 1908. Three and a half years later, on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, justices in the case Kalem Co. v. Harper Bros. issued their final ruling against the film company. That ruling on November 13, 1911 established the precedent that all motion picture production companies must first secure the film rights of any previously published work still under copyright before commissioning a screenplay based on that work. Ultimately, Kalem was required to pay the plaintiffs $25,000 ($ today) as well as all related court costs for the case. Earlier, in 1908, perhaps seeking to capitalize on the growing publicity of its case against Kalem and the release of the film, Harper & Brothers published the lavishly designed illustrated book The Chariot Race from Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace, which highlights only that event from the novel. Complementing the book's text are color illustrations by Ukrainian artist Sigismond Ivanowski. Surviving copies of the film Kalem's losses in copyright litigation and the related court injunctions limiting and then preventing presentations of the company's short, the film "for the most part disappeared". For many years, even the Library of Congress did not possess a full copy of the 1907 release, but that federal institution, the Museum of Modern Art, and other repositories later located and acquired prints. Now in the public domain, additional full and partial copies of Kalem's Ben Hur are available for public viewing on online streaming services such as YouTube. Before court-ordered injunctions and the final copyright-infringement rulings against Kalem were effectively enforced, copies of Ben Hur circulated in Europe as well as the United States. Various distributors at the time offered to sell both standard "plain stock" copies as well as hand-colored prints of the 1000-foot reel, which consists of approximately 16,000 individual frames. One American film-supply catalog in 1908 offered black-and-white prints of Ben Hur for $120 ($ USD today). Color versions produced in France, painted by hand in Paris, sold for an additional $150, costing $270 per copy ($ today) or 15 cents more per foot in 1908. No copies or fragments of the hand-tinted version of the film are currently known to exist. Notes References External links Google Book Search file on the case Harper & Brothers