The difficulty of copyright protection

It has been 20 years since Vietnam joined the Berne Convention (October 2004) on intellectual property rights. This is not a short period of time, but copyright infringement in the country is still widespread and increasingly complicated.

Violations in many areas

At an annual conference on copyright and copy rights held in Ho Chi Minh City recently, photographer Doan Hoai Trung, Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Photography Association, said that he was once given a book about a historical figure by a senior in the profession whose cover photo was a photo he had taken himself. However, the photo did not include the author's name. When asked, this person calmly replied: "I searched online, saw a beautiful photo so I used it. Now I know it's your photo." The result of that meeting was that the two people... had to laugh happily with each other!

This is not the only case. Once, NSNA Nguyen Xuan Han accidentally visited the website muoibaclieu.com.vn and discovered that this site used 15 of his photos, but without permission, without citing the author's name or source...

Or the case of NSNA Ta Quang Bao discovering that a large hotel in Hanoi hung more than 100 of his photos without his permission. When asked, the hotel said they found them online and used them freely.

According to NSNA Doan Hoai Trung, in the era of technology 4.0, photography is a rapidly developing and diverse field in the field of literature and art. The number of photographers is also increasing rapidly, producing millions of photos every day. However, copyright protection in this field has not received due attention, leading to more and more violations with different methods and tricks.

According to photographer Doan Hoai Trung, photography is a field where copyright infringement is quite common today.

“Photography copyright infringement is quite common, especially on social networking sites and business websites…”, said artist Doan Hoai Trung.

Copyright infringement is not only in the field of photography, but also in many other fields. Lawyer Phan Vu Tuan, Phan Law Firm, said that there are currently more than 300 books of Tre Publishing House being counterfeited and pirated. This is a group of 20% of the best-selling books, bringing in 80% of the sales for this unit. Particularly on digital platforms, copyright infringement of books in the form of pdf books and audio books is very complicated, causing great damage not only to publishing units but also to partners and publishing units granting rights.

According to lawyer Phan Vu Tuan, in the first 5 months of this year, there were 66,433 cases of copyright infringement of Vietnamese films (owned by K+ channel) on digital platforms, of which 46,684 cases were handled. Regarding football broadcasting programs, in the 2023-2024 season alone, there were more than 5.8 million cases of infringement, mainly on the Facebook platform.

There is no fundamental solution yet.

Vietnam Copyright Association (Vietrro) was established in 2010 with the main function of collective representation of copyright and related rights, as stipulated in Article 56 of the Law on Intellectual Property. To date, Vietrro has signed bilateral cooperation agreements with 22 organizations from countries such as Japan, Korea, Russia, India, Hungary, Philippines, etc.

However, according to Ms. Nguyen Thi Sanh, Permanent Vice President of Vietrro, over the past 14 years, Vietrro members have traveled from North to South, organizing many seminars to raise social awareness of copyright, but so far everything is still very vague. “The root cause of copyright infringement is the awareness of users. However, raising social awareness of this issue is extremely difficult,” Ms. Nguyen Thi Sanh shared.

According to lawyer Phan Vu Tuan, the copyright field is very complicated and the stories are getting more and more difficult. “In 2023, we handled 5.8 million cases of online copyright infringement. If in previous years, we handled 1-5 websites each year, in 2023 we closed 1,000 violating websites. This number shows that the fight against copyright infringement in Vietnam is taking place strongly, not doing nothing,” lawyer Phan Vu Tuan added.

Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Photography Association Doan Hoai Trung said that violations of photographic works occur frequently, but the issue of handling violations is rarely of concern to those responsible. Copyright in photography is protected by law, but in reality, when authors are infringed on, they are rarely protected. This situation is creating a bad precedent where those whose copyrights are violated do not know who to complain to.

From there, NSNA Doan Hoai Trung raised the issue: “Currently, there is no tool considered a standard in the issue of controlling and proactively detecting violations in cyberspace related to photography in particular and the fields of literature and art in general. This poses many difficulties in detecting and handling violations”.

Source: https://baolaocai.vn/gian-nan-bao-ve-ban-quyen-post388639.html