In an otherwise unexceptional copyright infringement case this year, the New York Court of Appeals (New York’s highest court), acting at the request of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, answered a question of New York law with potentially far-reaching implications for copyright lawsuits.  In Penguin Group (USA) Inc. v. American Buddha, the New York Court of Appeals held that in copyright infringement cases involving the uploading of a copyrighted printed literary work onto the Internet, the situs of injury for purposes of determining long-arm jurisdiction under the New York procedural code is the location of the copyright holder not the location of the infringing action. Thus, a New York copyright owner can bring in New York court a copyright infringement claim against defendants who are located outside of the state. The case involved allegedly infringing action by defendants in Oregon and Arizona; New York courts could hear the dispute. The traditional skepticism towards hauling out-of-state defendants into New York did not apply. “[A]lthough it may make sense in traditional commercial tort cases to equate a plaintiff’s injury with the place where its business is lost or threatened,” the New York Court of Appeals explained, “it is illogical to extend that concept to online copyright infringement cases where the place of uploading is inconsequential and it is difficult, if not impossible, to correlate lost sales to a particular geographic area.” In other words, if the Internet recognizes no borders, it would be unwise for New York courts to do so either.