Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc.

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).