Movie review originally meant rating and commenting on movies, this is a popular and simple way to provide information about movies, to introduce people who are interested in a certain movie. However, movie reviews are gradually being transformed into short videos cut and edited to fully introduce the movie content and then posted on YouTube, Facebook Watch, or TikTok, to make money. Therefore, is making those movie review videos a copyright violation? Let’s follow VCD’s next article.
1. Movie review and variations of the word “review”
Reviewing is currently a blooming trend among young people. The review profession is a profession that uses subjective opinions from a user’s perspective to evaluate a product, service, restaurant, tourist attractions, and even good movies. Express your honest feelings and assessments after each experience, thereby helping people decide whether to use the product or service or watch that movie again or not. In short, movie reviews are understood as the subjective feelings and assessments of the reviewer during the process of watching the movie.
According to the law, video review makers are not allowed to reveal the main details of the movie, but usually, they will give an overview of the characters, actors, or movie set. From there, the reviewers will express their personal opinions to help the audience have more reference information in the process of choosing the movie they will watch.
However, currently, the nature of movie reviews in Vietnam is a variation of a movie recap (summarizing part or all of the movie’s content). Short videos appear on social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok with the title being a movie review but a summary of the movie’s content. Because these videos/clips often narrate all the details of the movie and have little or no evaluation from the video maker. These videos even have misleading reviews of the film’s content, affecting the message the production team wants to convey to viewers.
2. Does a movie review violate copyright?
According to the Intellectual Property Law, “A derivative work is a work created based on one or more existing works through translation from one language to another, adaptation, compilation, annotation, selection, arrangement, musical adaptation and other adaptations”. In particular, creating movie review videos is considered a derivative work. Reviewing a movie that reveals all or part of the movie’s content is considered to be infringing on the copyright of the work and the owner’s rights to the work.
According to the newly amended and supplemented regulations in Clause 10, Article 4 of the Intellectual Property Law: “Copying is the creation of a copy of all or part of a work or audio or video recording by any means or What form? With this regulation, copying part of an official work is considered an act of copying, creating a legal basis to overcome problems due to the lack of clear provisions in the law in many cases related to copyright. previous author.
According to Article 28 of the Intellectual Property Law, among the acts of copyright infringement are:
- Making derivative works without the permission of the author or copyright owner of the work used to make derivative works, except in the case of converting the work into braille or another language for the disabled. town;
- Using the work without the copyright owner’s permission nor, not paying royalties, remuneration, or other material benefits as prescribed by law.
Thus, except for converting works into Braille or another language for the blind, any creation of derivative works must be approved by the author/owner of the original work.
In addition, movie reviewing is not included in the cases of using published works without asking for permission, without having to pay royalties or remuneration, and is also not included in the cases of using published works without requiring permission. allowed but must pay royalties and remuneration according to regulations.
Therefore, anyone who reviews a movie and reveals all or part of the existing movie content is violating the copyright of the work and the rights of the owner of the work. Depending on the level of violation, individuals and organizations making movie reviews may be administratively or criminally sanctioned according to the provisions of the law.
Above is the article “Disguised as a movie review video – Is there a copyright infringement?” We hope this article is useful to you.
