Using famous sentences, poems, and songs to make slogans and taglines for your brand can help the brand spread its reputation and become more known to more people because they all know the sentences and poems that famous songs. However, would a brand doing so be considered copyright infringement?
In advertising campaigns, brands can use famous and meaningful sentences, poems, and songs to carry out advertising, create slogans for products, and express the properties of products or things. That brands and products will bring to consumers. For example, in ViettelMoney’s advertising campaign, the line “Ting Ting in 1 note” was used in the song “Out of Mana” performed by Bigdaddy, Justatee, Binh Gold to represent the service’s ability to transfer money quickly provided by ViettelMoney. Moreover, a part of singer Sia’s song Titanium was used in an advertisement for Unilever’s Closeup toothpaste product. It can be seen that using famous sentences, poems, and songs to make advertising slogans for brands is very popular and brings positive effects to the brand. However, to do that, brands also need to pay attention to copyright issues when using famous sentences, poems, and songs of others.
Using a famous sentence, poem, or song to make a slogan or tagline for a brand is copying part of a work for commercial use. According to Clause 2, Article 20 of the Intellectual Property Law, organizations and individuals when exploiting and using the right to copy the above work must obtain permission from the copyright owner to pay royalties, other benefits, and other material (if any) to the copyright owner.
In addition, for works extracted from audio or video recordings, according to Article 26, Clause 1, Point b, Article 33, Clause 1, Point b of the Intellectual Property Law, in case the work has been copyrighted by the owner. If the author allows fixation on audio or video recordings for commercial purposes, organizations and individuals using these audio or video recordings in business or commercial activities do not have to ask for permission but must pay royalties to the copyright owner of the work, to the performers, producers of audio and video recordings, and broadcasting organizations according to the agreement from the time of use. In case an agreement cannot be reached, the rate schedule prescribed by the Government will be implemented. More specifically, Article 35 of Decree 17/2023/ND-CP also stipulates that if the above individuals and organizations do not pay royalties within 90 days from use, they must stop further use.
Above is the article “Using a famous sentence, verse, or song as a slogan or tagline for a brand is copyright infringement?“. Hope this article is useful to you.
