Belarusian Telegraph Agency has supported and justified the repression of the democratic opposition and of civil society on December 19, 2010 using falsified information."" Belarusian Telegraph Agency The Belarusian Telegraph Agency or BelTA (, , БелТА) is the state-owned national news agency of the Republic of Belarus. It operates in Russian, Belarusian, English, German and Spanish languages. The agency was founded on December 23, 1918. During the Soviet times BelTA cooperated with the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), although it was legally independent of it. After the USSR seized to exist in 1991, BelTA has been the national news agency of
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