TASS TASS Russian News Agency TASS (), abbr. TASS () is a major news agency in Russia, founded in 1904. TASS is the largest Russian news agency and one of the largest news agencies worldwide, along with Reuters, the Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP). TASS is registered as a Federal State Unitary Enterprise, owned by the Government of Russia. Headquartered in Moscow, TASS has 70 offices in Russia and in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), as well as 68 bureaus around the world. The TASS name comes from the former Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (, "Tyelyegrafnoye
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