The Paris Film Congress opens, an attempt by European producers to form an equivalent to the MPPC cartel in the United States.

The Paris Film Congress was a major meeting of European film producers and distributors in the French capital Paris from 2–4 February 1909. It intended to create an association to protect the interests of the participants through the formation of a trade organisation, a plan that ultimately failed.

The Motion Picture Patents Company, founded in December 1908 and effectively terminated in 1915 after it lost a federal antitrust suit, was a trust of all the major American film companies and local foreign-branches, the leading film distributor and the biggest supplier of raw film stock, Eastman Kodak. The MPPC ended the domination of foreign films on American screens, standardized the manner in which films were distributed and exhibited within the United States, and improved the quality of American motion pictures by internal competition. It also discouraged its members' entry into feature film production, and the use of outside financing, both to its members' eventual detriment.

February 2 is the 33rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 332 days remain until the end of the year.