Copyrights: The right of communication to the public in Vietnam

Should hotels in Vietnam pay royalties for music?

In May 2017, many hoteliers distributing broadcast signals in Vietnam reacted angrily to the new legal requirement which obliges them to start paying a royalty to VCPMC (Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright), the biggest collecting society for playing music and/or broadcasting in their hotel rooms.

While this is a common (but not without dispute) practice in the EU following the concept of the right of communication to the public, this topic at that time attracted a great deal of attention in the country with an abundance of contradicting information and resultant backlash. Since Vietnam’s copyright legislation is still in its early development, I and Quyen Dau, a Vietnamese IP lawyer, felt the need to write an article (in Vietnamese) to shed light on the (new) concept.

This writing referred to a number of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rulings where the court has interpreted “the communication to the public” in both digital and analogue environments. The authors viewed that even the CJEU case law is very near chaotic,^[1] Vietnam should not, therefore, insist on a static understanding of this concept. We recommended a more cooperative, not hierarchical, approach from the VCPMC to find a common ground between the two parties.

The article, titled in Vietnamese Luật chơi cho chính mình (or Abiding by the rules in English) was published by the Saigontimes in September 2017. View full text (in Vietnamese) here.

[1] The Rt. Hon. Professor Sir Robin Jacob, ‘Is IP out of control?’ Journal of IP Law and Practice (2020) 15(2), 98, 102.