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Task force on mission to open copyrights protection centre
An intellectual property rights official has made it her mission to ensure unauthorized copying of written works, especially rampant in the academic sphere, is rooted out.
Doan Thi Lam Luyen, director of the Literary Property Right Centre, is a member of a new task force that is campaigning for setting up an institution to safeguard the copyright-holders of publications.
“Reproducing parts or the whole of a book for study or research purposes is not forbidden as long as royalties are paid to the writers,” she said. “Otherwise, their interests are jeopardised.”
For long, this has been a common practice at schools, libraries and even public offices.
Students usually get chapters of a book or articles from a magazine photocopied or scanned so that they do not need to buy them.
Even teachers copy books in large numbers to distribute to students.
A single work is likely to see thousands of copies made by educational institutions to the great loss of its author.
Copying on a large scale cannot be considered to be done for academic purposes, Luyen said.
If the institution does come into existence, it would collect fees each time a work is copied and pass them on to the associations of copyright holders to be given to the author.
It would also be tasked with authorising copying of books on behalf of writers.
But Luyen predicted a bumpy road ahead, given the misconceptions about the right to copy publications and the limited budgets of educational institutions who are the biggest offenders./.
Vietnamplus
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