Copyright Office[2][3] or that were published after March 13, 1995, the date Russia signed the Berne Convention.

Of the more than 500 articles Russian Kurier had copied from 1992 to 1995,[4] the court considered 317 copyrighted in the U.S. as "Berne Works" (i.e., works originally published in another member country of the Berne Convention, of which the U.S. had been a member since 1989), and a further 28 first published in Russia before March 13, 1995 were copyrighted in the U.S. because they were indeed registered at the U.S.

March 10, 1997); also known as "Itar-TASS II"), the court found Russian Kurier and its owner had willfully committed multiple copyright violations.

There was some dispute over the copyright claims by the newspapers, as the defendants' experts argued that these only held a copyright on their publication "as a whole" but not on individual articles, but the district judge agreed with the plaintiffs' expert who interpreted the relevant paragraphs of the Russian law as giving rise to "parallel exclusive rights in both the newspaper publisher and the reporter", similar to co-authorship.

The court of appeals, after extensive analysis, found the view of the defendants' experts on the matter "more compelling".

[8] The decision is only effective within the U.S.; other countries may follow other rules, such as using the lex loci delicti exclusively.

In London Film Productions, Ltd. v. Intercontinental Communications, Inc. (1984) a US corporation was sued by a British company for infringements under the laws of several Latin American countries; the US court determined that it had jurisdiction.

A US judge basically overruled a decision by the High Court of Arbitration of Russia because, in his view, the Russian court's decision was "strongly influenced, if not coerced, by the efforts of various Russian government officials seeking to promote 'state interests'",[12] thus lacking procedural fairness.

This ruling quashed the decision of a lower court, which had decided that in a lawsuit between a reporter-cameraman of a US media company operating in France, the US law applied in determining ownership of the footage.