Continue to complete the draft Law amending and supplementing the Law on Intellectual Property

Chairman of the National Assembly's Law Committee Hoang Thanh Tung. Source: VNA

Chairman of the Law Committee Hoang Thanh Tung chaired the workshop.

Deputy Chairwoman of the Law Committee Nguyen Thi Mai Phuong said that the draft Law amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Intellectual Property is a law project under the Law and Ordinance Development Program for 2021-2022 and the approval process at 2 sessions.

At the 2nd Session (October 2021), the National Assembly gave its opinions on the draft law. Immediately after the session, based on the discussion opinions of the National Assembly deputies, the Standing Committee of the Law Committee coordinated with the drafting agency and relevant agencies to conduct 4 rounds of receiving and revising the draft law.

To date, after revision, 119 articles of the current Intellectual Property Law have been amended and supplemented (an increase of 9 articles compared to the draft law submitted to the National Assembly at the 2nd Session), of which 12 articles are technical amendments and supplements and 5 articles are the abolition of some regulations; at the same time, a number of articles of the Law on Prices, the Law on Customs, the Law on Science and Technology, and the Law on Management and Use of Public Assets are amended and supplemented.

According to the Deputy Chairman of the Law Committee, basically, the major contents of the draft law, especially the issues that the Government requested opinions on, have achieved high consensus between the reviewing agency and the drafting agency on the plan to receive, revise and present as the draft law such as the name of the law, scope of regulation; on the assignment of the right to register inventions, industrial designs, and layout designs as the result of scientific and technological tasks using the state budget, expanding the assignment of the right to register for plant varieties, etc.

At the conference, experts made in-depth comments and proposed solutions to amend the draft law's provisions on exceptional cases, non-infringement of copyright; on derivative works and the relationship between the right to make derivative works and the right to protect the integrity of works, exhaustion of rights and parallel import in the field of copyright and related rights; regulations on trademarks, industrial designs, geographical indications...

Point a, Clause 1, Article 25 of the draft law stipulates cases of using published works without permission or paying royalties, but must provide information about the author's name, origin, and source of the work, including: self-copying a copy for scientific research, personal study, and not for commercial purposes.

This provision does not apply in the case of copying by public copying equipment.

Associate Professor, Dr. Le Thi Nam Giang, Director of the Intellectual Property Center of Ho Chi Minh City University of Law, said that this regulation aims to control the creation of multiple copies from public copying facilities, especially from photocopying services. This could be one of the ways to control compliance with intellectual property laws at photocopying establishments.

However, according to Ms. Giang, this regulation is not really suitable for the reality in Vietnam and does not really aim at the public interest in serving the purpose of serving learning and research. This regulation restricts the rights of learners and researchers when exercising the right to copy works.

In Vietnam today, even school libraries do not provide services for users to photocopy their own works. On the other hand, controlling whether the copies of works used are actually “self-copied” or copied by a service can be difficult.

In reality, there is no control or strict enforcement of sanctions against photocopy establishments that violate copyright laws. Therefore, this regulation is difficult to apply effectively in practice.

Therefore, Ms. Giang proposed to amend point a, clause 1, Article 25 as "Reasonably copy a part of the work for personal study purposes and not for commercial purposes. Copy one copy for research."

Associate Professor, Dr. Le Thi Nam Giang emphasized that along with completing the draft law, it is necessary to coordinate other measures such as strictly managing photocopying establishments, raising public awareness and consciousness about copyright to facilitate the implementation of regulations on these copyright exceptions.

Musician Dinh Trung Can, General Director of the Vietnam Center for Music Copyright Protection (VCPMC), pointed out that the current situation of copyright and related rights violations has posed urgent requirements in the work of building laws to protect copyrights in order to overcome difficulties and shortcomings in practice, prevent copyright infringement, protect the rights and legitimate interests of domestic and foreign authors and copyright owners, and comply with the provisions of Vietnamese law and international treaties to which Vietnam is a party.

VCPMC proposes to add a provision allowing authors to waive one, some or all of their personal rights. Adding this provision not only gives authors more freedom to choose to limit/not limit their rights, but also gives authors more tools to negotiate a higher value in transferring copyright, while allowing copyright owners more freedom in exploiting their works.

VCPMC also proposed to add regulations on heirs, authorized persons, and transferees of personal rights who have full decision-making power after the author's death, to avoid cases where it is not possible to identify the person who needs permission when using the rights...

According to VNA