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Experts discuss enforcing intellectual property laws
Lawyers and representatives of HCM City Market Management Bureau met Thursday in HCM City to discuss the challenges of enforcing Decree 97 on industrial property.
The meeting heard that the increased fines in the decree that took effect last November should be a greater deterrent to counterfeit, but enforcers found it hard to keep track of fake products, because of companies' constantly changing product lines and the sophisticated operations of the counterfeit goods makers.
Tran Manh Hung, lawyer of Baker&McKenzie, said under the November amendments, organisations or individuals committing activities relating to the sale of fake brand or trademark goods were liable to fines of VND4 million-VND500 million, plus the confiscation of profits gained.
The previous penalty for industrial property violations was only 1-5 times the value of infringing goods. Such values had been hard and time-consuming to ascertain, plus the resultant fines were too small to be deterrent, experts at the meeting said.
Huynh Cong Son, Deputy Head of Division 3A under the HCM City Market Management Bureau, said it had been very difficult and time consuming for the Department of Finance to determine the value of the infringing goods.
Son said with the technological advancements, fake goods were harder to detect, plus legitimate companies updated designs so regularly that enforcement agencies could not keep up.
The amendments needed to be clarified to make enforcement more effective, he noted.
Nguyen Thi Bich Thuy from Viet Intellectual Property Ltd Company said the new decree made a clearer division of power between authorities to handle the different types of Intellectual Property (IP) infringements.
The Science and Technology Inspectorate had wide-ranging powers over all infringements, including patent infringements, Thuy said.
The Market Management Department was responsible for violations in trade, transport and distribution, she said.
A Unilever Viet Nam representative said that tight control of formulation, materials and production processes was essential. The company offered training to distributors, retailers and sales team to raise awareness in recognising the IP violations in the market, she said.
She said the company also demanded a commitment from all suppliers, agencies, distributors and their networks not to violate IP laws.
The illegal businesses tended to break up sales and delivery consignments into smaller batches to avoid detection, production was also broken up into small disperse units, making the source of fake products hard to trace. The use of fictional addresses in business registration documentation was also common, she said.
To follow IP infringement cases to the end was time consuming, taking nearly 100 days, according to Article 27 of Decree 97.
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