Vietnam and the Piracy Problem - The implications of Vietnam's WTO membership and the enactment of TRIPs

Abstract: On January 11, 2007, Vietnam joined the WTO. A requirement for joining the WTO is the adoption of TRIPs, a multilateral agreement whose purpose is to provide effective and adequate protection for intellectual property rights, in order to minimize obstacles to international trade and promote global competition. After joining the WTO, hopes were high that Vietnam’s copyright piracy would rapidly decrease. However, these expectations were not met and today, ten years later, copyright piracy is still a big problem in the country. The question is thus what could be done in order to reduce the piracy rates – and what are the reasons behind the vast percentage of piracy? Intellectual property rights are a relatively new concept in Vietnam, and the first comprehensive intellectual property law was not adopted until 2005. After amendments in 2009, the Law on Intellectual Property can be said to comply with the TRIPs standard in theory. In practice however, opinions differ on whether the law could really be said to live up to the TRIPs requirements. In particular, the enforcement system was deemed insufficient. As the Vietnamese court system is deemed incapable, most copyright infringement cases are referred to the administrative route. Nevertheless, the administrative action route is also criticized for being slow and not sufficiently up-to-date with current technology. The conclusion of this thesis is that the underlying reason behind the problem of copyright piracy in Vietnam is complex. The thesis concludes that the main reasons behind the problem are the country’s situation as a developing country and the fact that intellectual property rights are initially a Western concept. To change a rehearsed behaviour takes time, and this could be one explanatory factor to why copyright piracy decreases so slowly. To deal with the problem of copyright piracy, this thesis suggests several changes. First, the work on raising public awareness as regards the existence of copyright must continue. Secondly, the country’s judges needs to be educated on questions relating to copyright infringement. Thirdly, an overview of the existing administrative enforcement agencies should be performed, preferably resulting in a decrease of the number of agencies. Fourthly, an overview of the current Law on Intellectual Property should be performed. As of today, this thesis argues that the existing law does not live up to the standards of TRIPs. Lastly, it would be benefitting for both practitioners, judges themselves and law students if Vietnam decided to start publish its court cases. Lastly, this thesis also put forward some alterations that the right owners themselves could perform in order to protect themselves from copyright piracy. It is recommended that the right owners stay pro-active and that they cooperate and put pressure on the Vietnamese Government. Moreover, it is suggested that the right owners try to provide legal alternatives, in an attempt to try to curb for example online piracy. Lastly, it is proposed that differentiated prices on software might have a positive effect on reducing software piracy.