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. 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