Software copyright and open source under Vietnamese law

·

Computer programs are protected as literary works. An open-source licence is a conditional contract — breach the conditions and you lose the right to use at all.

How software is protected

Computer programs are protected as literary works, whether expressed in source or object code. The right arises automatically when the code is written; registration is not required.

The direct consequence: copyright protects the specific code, not the algorithm or the functionality it implements. Others may reimplement the same functionality in their own code. That is why many programs do the same job without infringing each other.

To protect the underlying technical idea you need a different route: a patent for a technical solution using software, or trade secret protection for whatever is not exposed.

The fee is VND 600,000 — the highest in the Circular 211/2016/TT-BTC schedule. The dossier includes source or object code plus a description.

Worth doing? If the software is a core business asset, yes, for two practical reasons: you get evidence of ownership at a fixed date, and you have documentation for valuation, fundraising or assignment.

But do not confuse it with good source control. Authenticated commit history plus assignment contracts with your developers is usually the stronger evidentiary package.

Open-source licences under Vietnamese law

MIT, Apache 2.0 and GPL are not a waiver of copyright. They depend on copyright to work. The author keeps the right and grants you permission subject to conditions.

In Vietnamese terms this is a non-exclusive licence with attached conditions. Breach the conditions and the permission ends — at which point your continued use is unauthorised reproduction, i.e. infringement.

Three families and their real obligations

Permissive (MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0). Use, modify and distribute, including in closed commercial products. The minimum obligation: retain the copyright notice and licence text. It is the simplest obligation and the most frequently breached — plenty of commercial products ship MIT libraries with no licence file anywhere. Apache 2.0 adds patent terms and a requirement to state changes made.

Strong copyleft (GPL, AGPL). Distribute software containing GPL code and the whole derivative work must be released under the same licence with source. AGPL extends this to providing the software over a network — so a web service using AGPL code triggers the obligation even though nothing is "distributed" in the traditional sense.

This is a genuine risk for Vietnamese software businesses: one AGPL library inside a SaaS product can require opening the entire service's source.

Weak copyleft (LGPL, MPL). The source obligation is limited to the modified library, not the whole product.

The minimum to do

Inventory your dependencies and their licences (dependency scanners do this automatically — run one in CI). Set an explicit policy on which licences are allowed; for closed commercial products this usually means permitting MIT, BSD and Apache 2.0 and prohibiting GPL and AGPL without specific approval. Ship a licence notice file with your releases — cheap, easy, and a real legal obligation. And make your software contractors contractually responsible for the licensing of code they deliver.

When you publish open source

Three things to check: that you actually own the economic rights in all the code (revisit your employee and contractor contracts); that authors' moral rights survive publication, so attribution must be preserved; and that the licence choice is a deliberate business decision rather than a copied LICENSE file from another project.

Cited documents

Sources