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 works. But copyright owners of non-U.S. works still must comply with registration requirements if they wish to seek statutory damages in court. The removal of registration as a precondition to filing an infringement claim for non-U.S. works was one of the results of the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 and the WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act of 1998. Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court has recently clarified in Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick that section 411(a) merely contains "claim-processing rules" rather than "jurisdictional conditions". Thus, the Court ruled that "[s]ection 411(a)'s registration requirement is a precondition to filing a claim that does not restrict a federal court's subject-matter jurisdiction."

For the purposes of section 411, a full definition of "United States work" is set out in section 101. This definition provides:

For purposes of section 411, a work is a "United States work" only if—

The legislative history of section 411 suggests a fairly strong correlation between the definition of "United States work" in the Copyright Act and the definition of "country of origin" in the Berne Convention. The apparent intention of the U.S. Congress was to parallel the relevant definitions in section 101 with those terms contained in Article 5(4) of the Berne Convention.