TASS After 1971, TASS was elevated to the status of State Committee at the Government of the Soviet Union. The agency was frequently used as a front organization by the Soviet intelligence agencies, such as the NKVD (later KGB) and Main Intelligence Directorate, with TASS employees serving as informants. In 1959, Alexander Alexeyev was dispatched to Cuba on a fact-finding mission, ostensibly working for TASS. In January 1992, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a Presidential Decree signed by Boris Yeltsin re-defined status of TASS and renamed it the "Information Telegraph Agency of Russia". In May 1994 The Russian Government
Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc. was claimed applied ("lex loci delicti"). Itar-TASS, several Russian newspapers, and a Russian association of professional journalists (the Union of Journalists of Russia, in Russian: Союз журналистов России) 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