News eventually the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS). The Chinese Communist Party created its news agency, the Red China News Agency, in 1931; its primary responsibilities were the "Red China" newspaper and the internal "Reference News". In 1937, the Party renamed the agency "Xinhua", New China. Xinhua became the official news agency of the People's Republic of China in 1949. These agencies touted their ability to distill events into "minute globules of news", 20–30 word summaries which conveyed the essence of new developments. Unlike newspapers, and contrary to the sentiments of some of their reporters, the agencies sought to
Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc. came to the conclusion that under Russian copyright law, the news agency Itar-TASS and the individual authors of the newspaper articles certainly were copyright holders and thus entitled to sue. However, the district court denied the journalist's association any right to relief as it was unclear exactly which of its members were authors of the copied articles, or whether all such authors were indeed members. 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