Data collection is one of the subjects protected by copyright according to the provisions of international conventions and Vietnamese law. For example, one person collected folk songs, idioms, and proverbs from all over the country and arranged them by topic, gathering them into a book called “Vietnamese folk songs, idioms, and proverbs”, then that book is protected under the category of data collection. We would like to introduce this article to our readers to learn more about how data collection is protected by copyright in Vietnam.
1. Regulations on data collection protection according to several international conventions on intellectual property
Important international conventions on copyright, including the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (revised 1971), the Agreement on Commercial Aspects of Property Rights (TRIPS) of 1994, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) of 1996 both recognize copyright protection for data collections.
In Clause 5, Article 2 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, Data Collections are stipulated as follows: “Collections, literary works or works of art, such as Encyclopedias and anthologies, the selection or arrangement of which is the result of intellectual activity, must be protected as such, without prejudice to the copyright of the works constituting them in this collection”.
In addition, Article 10, Paragraph 2 of the 1994 TRIPS Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights stipulates: “Collections of data or other material, whether in machine-readable form or in other forms, where the selection or arrangement of content is the result of intellectual activity must be protected as it is. The above protection, to the extent that it does not cover the data or materials themselves, must not affect the existing copyright in the data or materials themselves.
In addition, the WIPO Copyright Treaty (1996) also mentions the protection of data collection in Article 5, specifically: “Data or other materials collected in any form, which constitute intellectual creations, are protected. This protection does not extend to the data or materials themselves and is without prejudice to any copyright in the data or materials in the collection.
Vietnam is a member of the above conventions and has codified the above provisions in the Vietnam Intellectual Property Law.
2. Regulations on data collection protection according to Vietnamese law
Data collection is one of the types of works protected by copyright, recorded at Point m, Clause 1, Article 14 of the Intellectual Property Law.
According to Article 22, Clause 2 of the Intellectual Property Law, data collection is “a creative collection expressed in the selection and arrangement of documents in electronic or other forms.” For example, a person can collect and publish his own short stories, titled “A collection of short stories by author A”; or one can collect photos of cloud landscapes in the Northwest region by many different authors and create a photo collection called “Northwest Clouds”. Currently, electronic databases are also protected by copyright in the form of data collections. The author of a data collection may or may not be the author of the documents in that data collection, but is only the person who collects and arranges the available documents in a certain order.
The author of the data collection will have full moral and property rights over that data collection, specifically:
- Name the data collection work;
- Put your real name or pseudonym on the data collection work; be given your real name or pseudonym when the work is published or used;
- Publish the work or allow others to publish the data collection work;
- Protect the integrity of the data collection work, and do not allow others to edit, mutilate, or distort the work in any form that is harmful to the author’s honor and reputation.
- Making derivative works;
- Directly or indirectly copy all or part of the work by any means or form;
- Distributing to the public originals and copies of works;
- Broadcast and communicate works to the public;
In addition, Article 22, Clause 2 of the Intellectual Property Law also stipulates that copyright protection for data collections does not cover the materials themselves, and does not prejudice the copyright of the materials themselves. Therefore, it can be understood that copyright for data collection and copyright for materials belonging to data collection are independent of each other, the implementation and formation of data collection work is independent. The data must not prejudice the materials’ copyright in the data collection.
Above is the article “Copyright protection for data collection“. We hope this article is useful to you.
