General school and university students will be required to pay copyright licensing when copying documents they need for their studies, once the Viet Nam Reproduction Right Organization (Viettro) and the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) reaches an agreement on the issue.

“Vietnamese students need to pay reasonable fees to be able to legally copy documents,” said Doan Thi Lam Luyen, Deputy Chair and Secretary General of Viettro.

Luyen went on to say that the organization is negotiating with MOET on copyright fee collection. MOET’s Minister Pham Vu Luan has agreed that the two sides, MOET, representing individual document copiers, and Viettro, representing the copyright authors, would sit together to discuss related matters.

“The two sides will work out the fee collection in 2014 following a detailed program before we can reach a consensus,” Luyen said.

Also according to Luyen, nearly 20 million Vietnamese students have been violating the laws when using free photocopied documents for their studies. Under the Intellectual Property Law, the copyright fee is only exempted on the individuals who need to copy documents for their teaching or research work.

She went on to say that now is the right time for Vietnamese students to understand that they need to pay for using others’ intellectual property and abide by the laws.

Regarding the fee rates, Viettro plans to charge every general school student VND8,000 per annum and VND21,000 ($1) to every university student, for the right to unlimited document photocopying.

The rates were set by Viettro after considering relevant legal documents and the amount of material photocopied by students every year.

A student of the Hanoi Law University, when asked if she accepts paying a copyright fee for photocopied documents, said she does not think Viettro can collect fees from students.

“Will we have to contact every author when we want to use their documents for our studies? What will we have to do to find authors living overseas?” she questioned.

In reply, Viettro said the organization would not collect fees directly from individuals, but from schools and local education departments, once it is authorized by the authors.

Meanwhile, a lawyer said he is doubtful that Viettro can collect fees for intellectual property on the Internet. He said while it is easy to charge for photocopying of printed documents, it will be nearly impossible to collect fees in “cyberspace” due to the lack of a reasonable legal framework, and technical conditions.

He noted that the current legal framework in Viet Nam does not facilitate people using intellectual property in a legal way, while sometimes it prompts them to infringe on the laws.

The representative from Viettro said it would propose that responsible agencies remove those websites which do not produce content but just copy from others. “Newspapers lose trillions of dong every year due to the existence of these websites. However, they have yet not cooperated with Viettro to stop the problem,” Luyen said.

(Source: VietNamNet)