Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc., 153 F.3d 82 (2d Cir. 1998), was a copyright case about the Russian language weekly Russian Kurier in New York City that had copied and published various materials from Russian newspapers and news agency reports of Itar-TASS. The case was ultimately decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The decision was widely commented upon and the case is considered a landmark case because the court defined rules applicable in the U.S. on the extent to which the copyright laws of the country of origin or those of the U.S. apply in international disputes over copyright. The court held that to determine whether a claimant actually held the copyright on a work, the laws of the country of origin usually applied (more precisely: "copyright is a form of property" and under the Second Restatement's approach, the governing law is "determined by the law of the state with 'the most significant relationship' to the property and to the parties"), but that to decide whether a copyright infringement had occurred and for possible remedies, the laws of the country where the infringement was claimed applied (lex loci delicti).
Case history
Itar-TASS, several Russian newspapers, and the Union of Journalists of Russia sued Russian Kurier, its owner, and its printing company for copyright infringement in 1995 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The court issued a preliminary injunction against the defendant. This preliminary injunction applied to all copied articles for which the plaintiffs had registered copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office or that were published after March 13, 1995, the date Russia signed the Berne Convention. The U.S. at that time still required explicit copyright registrations for copyrights to be recognized as valid. Of the more than 500 articles Russian Kurier had copied from 1992 to 1995,
In its ruling two years later (No. 95 Civ. 2144(JGK) (S.D.N.Y. March 10, 1997); also known as "Itar-TASS II"), the court found Russian Kurier and its owner had willfully committed multiple copyright violations. The court upheld the injunction and fined the defendants US$ 500,000 in favor of the plaintiffs. The printing company was fined US$3,934 as by printing the newspaper, the court considered it had contributed to the commitment of these copyright violations, although without intent. Since the Berne Convention does not offer any guidance on which law shall be applied to determine copyright ownership, this ruling is still the relevant case law in this question and the principle is applied in the U.S. even in other recent cases. The decision is only effective within the U.S.; other countries may follow other rules, such as using the lex loci delicti exclusively.
The copyright in the U.S. on foreign publications that had failed to comply with the (former) formality requirements of the U.S. was generally restored when the copyright restorations of the Uruguay Round Agreement Act (URAA) became effective in the U.S. on January 1, 1996. The URAA was a result of the TRIPS agreement, part of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. The URAA automatically restored the copyright on foreign works that were still copyrighted in their country of origin on January 1, 1996,