What copyright does not protect
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Ideas, procedures, methods, data and legal instruments all fall outside protection. The idea/expression line is where many disputes collapse.
Article 15 of the IP Law lists what falls outside copyright. It is a short list but a weighty one, because it draws the boundary of the whole regime.
Three excluded groups
Purely factual news of the day. Events and the facts about them belong to no one. "Gold rose by VND 500,000 per tael yesterday" is a fact anyone may report. But an analysis of why it rose, with its own reasoning and phrasing, is a protected journalistic work.
Legal instruments, administrative documents, other judicial documents and their official translations. The law is common property. That is why this site can quote provisions freely, and why you need nobody's permission to reproduce a decree in full.
Procedures, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles and data. The most important and the most misunderstood group.
The idea/expression line
Copyright protects how you express something, not what you express. Abstract as that sounds, the consequences are concrete:
- A recipe: the ingredient list and steps are a method and are unprotected. The prose describing the dish, the photographs and the book's layout are protected. Others may cook your recipe and write it up in their own words.
- An algorithm: the algorithm itself is a method. The specific code implementing it is a protected computer program. Others may reimplement it in their own code.
- A film premise: "a poor boy loves a rich girl on a sinking ship" is a concept belonging to no one. The specific screenplay, with its dialogue and scenes, is protected.
- Statistics: the numbers are data. How you select and arrange them may form a protected data collection.
What to use instead
Falling outside copyright does not mean being defenceless — it means reaching for a different tool: a patent or utility solution for a new technical method; trade secret protection for a confidential formula; an NDA for ideas under negotiation; a trademark for names and slogans; trade secret plus employment terms for a customer database.
Why this matters before you sue
A great many disputes fail exactly here. The claimant feels their idea was stolen, but on analysis what was taken is the unprotected part: the general structure, the approach, the business model, the outline. If the defendant rewrote everything in their own words with their own images, however similar the result feels, infringement is very hard to establish.
Before spending money on a case, ask yourself: was the specific expression copied, or only the underlying idea? The answer decides whether the case is worth pursuing.