Writer: Vi Tran
In recent years, creative works become more and more important in modern life. However, most people do not understand appropriately about their copyright, especially relating to the ownership of the copyright. A common question like when other people must ask their permission to use copyright or part of it is hard to fully understand, right?
Thus, BLawyers Vietnam’s lawyers would give some highlights of copyright holders’ right pursuant to Vietnamese laws for your consideration as follows:
1. What is copyright and its elements?
Pursuant to prevailing Vietnamese Law on Intellectual Property, copyright means rights of organizations and individuals to works they have created or owned. Copyright includes into two parts, which are economic rights and moral rights.
Moral rights are the rights to:
- Name the works;
- Have real names or pseudonyms on the works; Have real names or pseudonyms shown when the works is published or used;
- Publish the works or give permission for another one to publish the works (“Publishing Right”); and
- Protect the integrity of works; not allow anyone to edit, trim or falsify the works by any means which affects the honor and reputation of the author.
Meanwhile, economic rights are the rights to:
- Make derivative works;
- Perform the works in public;
- Copy the works;
- Distribute or import the originals or copies of the works;
- Publish their works publicly by wired or wireless network, electronic information network or other technical networks; and
- Lease the originals or copies of cinematographic works and computer programs.
2. Which subjects does Vietnamese law protect copyright?
They are organizations and individuals that have works covered by copyright include authors, co-authors and copyright holders. Authors and co-authors are persons who personally create works on their own. Copyright holders mean organizations and individuals that hold one, several or all the economic rights.
Organizations having the authors as members and assigning such authors to create works are copyright holders. In addition, organizations or individuals having contracts with the authors to create works are copyright holders as well.
3. Could the law limit copyright of each copyright holder?
If the authors using their own financial and physical materials to create the works, they will have full moral and economic rights of their works. Otherwise, except for the Publishing Right, moral rights to their works exclusively belong to the authors. However, they can freely transfer their Publishing Right and economic right to another copyright holders.
Besides, the copyright holders have all economic rights and the publishing right, should there is no other agreement between the parties. This means the copyright holders can perform, publish the works in public, copy and/or make derivative works and even distribute, import or export the works without having to obtain the authors’ permission.
Not only an example but also an important note, if a creative company has their employees create the works, they must pay attention to their limits of copyright. Even if such company has full economic rights and publishing right towards the works as there is no further agreement, the employees who directly create the works, still reserve their moral rights towards their creativity and such rights cannot be transferred to any others.
If you need to study more about this matter, please email us at firstname.lastname@example.org.
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