Vietnam's Supreme People's Court Approves Its First Intellectual Property Precedents
Vietnam's courts now have their first precedents dedicated to intellectual property. On 24 September 2026, the Council of Judges of the Supreme People's Court approved three IP precedents, according to an alert published by the law firm Rouse on 7 October.
Vietnam is a civil law country, but precedents carry real weight there. Once selected by the Council of Judges and published by the Chief Justice, a precedent must be studied and applied by courts at all levels in cases with similar legal facts, and a court that declines to follow one has to give its reasons. The official texts were not yet published when Rouse wrote, so the descriptions below follow the drafts the Council considered.
The first concerns damages for copyright infringement of computer software and is drawn from Appellate Judgment No. 07/2023/KDTM-PT of 10 March 2023. Where the owner can prove actual licence transactions in Vietnam, the court may use the fee from a comparable, recent licence before the infringement as the basis for damages. Rouse notes that claimants otherwise have to prove actual loss and a direct causal link, which is often difficult in software cases.
The second, from Appellate Judgment No. 66/2023/KDTM-PT of 27 June 2023, deals with the burden of proving copyright. The defendant held a registration certificate for a song, while the claimant said the lyrics copied a poem it had created and published earlier. According to Rouse, the draft confirms that a certificate is not conclusive when credible contrary evidence is produced. The court must examine the evidence of creation and publication, and the certificate holder must prove its authorship or ownership.
The third, from First-instance Judgment No. 04/2026/HS-ST of 12 January 2026, concerns the criminal offence of infringing industrial property rights under Article 226 of the Criminal Code. It addresses intentional trading in goods bearing signs identical or confusingly similar to protected trademarks without the owner's consent. Rouse notes that Article 226 is itself under review in a pending amendment of the Criminal Code.
The second precedent has a parallel in Indonesia. Under Law No. 28 of 2014 on Copyright, recording a work (pencatatan) is not a condition for protection (Article 64(2)), and the person named in a recording certificate is presumed to be the author only unless proven otherwise (Article 31). In both countries, a certificate helps, but dated drafts, publication records and chain-of-title documents are what settle a contested authorship claim.
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