## Facts

- Los Angeles News Service (LANS) filmed helicopter video footage during the April 1992 Los Angeles riots, creating two copyrighted works depicting assaults at Florence Avenue and Normandie Boulevard.
- LANS registered copyrights and licensed the footage to NBC for broadcast; LANS retained ownership and the right to license the works.
- NBC transmitted its broadcast feed to Visnews in New York, where Visnews recorded the broadcast and transmitted copies to overseas subscribers and to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
- EBU copied the footage and transmitted it by satellite to Reuters’ London branch, which distributed copies to Reuters subscribers.
- LANS did not authorize Visnews, Reuters, or foreign subscribers to copy, transmit, or redistribute the footage and alleged that worldwide distribution harmed its licensing market.

## Issues

1. Whether a copyright plaintiff may recover actual damages from foreign exploitation when the foreign exploitation is causally linked to an infringing act committed in the United States.
2. Whether defendants’ copying and retransmission of the footage constituted fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107.
3. Whether the district court erred in limiting and calculating statutory damages and in restricting damages to domestic exploitation.

## Decision

- The Ninth Circuit affirmed the finding of infringement and affirmed the rejection of the fair-use defense.
- The court held that, although the Copyright Act is territorial and does not impose liability for wholly foreign acts, LANS could seek actual damages for foreign exploitation that flowed from a domestic “predicate act” of infringement (copying in New York).
- The court affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court’s damages rulings and remanded for further proceedings on damages consistent with its holdings.

## Legal Principles

- The Copyright Act generally has no extraterritorial application; liability cannot be based solely on acts occurring entirely outside the United States.
- When a domestic act of infringement is established, a plaintiff may recover actual damages that are proximately caused by that domestic infringement, even if the resulting exploitation occurs abroad.
- Commercial redistribution of a copyrighted work is not fair use where the defendant copies and retransmits the “heart” of the work, the use is not meaningfully transformative, and the use threatens the copyright holder’s licensing market.
- In fair-use analysis, market substitution and impairment of a licensing market weigh strongly against fair use, even where the underlying work contains factual material and has been published.

## Conclusion

The Ninth Circuit held that a domestic act of infringement can support recovery of damages attributable to downstream foreign exploitation, and it rejected fair use for a commercial news distributor’s non-transformative copying and retransmission of the core footage, remanding for recalculation and consideration of damages consistent with that rule.


Los Angeles News Serv. v. Reuters Television Int’l, Ltd., 149 F.3d 987 (9th Cir. 1998), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1141 (1999)