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Copyrights: The right of communication to the public

In May 2017, many hoteliers in Vietnam distributing broadcast signals reacted angrily to the new legal requirement that they had to pay a royalty for playing music and/or broadcasting in their hotel rooms to VCPMC, the biggest collecting society in Vietnam.

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 Vietnam 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 shedding light on the (new) concept.

This writing referred to a number of 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 even ask for 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. The full text can be accessed 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.