Recently, First News, a famous Vietnamese publisher house, has filed a copyright petition against Alibaba-owned e-commence sites, Lazada, for the latter’s failure to handle vendors selling 'counterfeit books' on its platform. It is the first time an e-commence sites was sued with respect of the book copyright. Therefore, this action possibly landmarked the milestone in legal battle on book copyrights which seems to be hotter in the “4.0 era”.

On 9 September 2020, the People’s Court of District 1 received the Petition of Vietcreating Company Limited (“First News”) against Recess Company Limited which owns and manages the e-commerce site Lazada (“Lazada”) on the act of supporting the consumption of goods for the counterfeit-book suppliers at a much lower price compared to original price.

In its petition, First News strongly requested Lazada to remove all information related to fake books, which discovered and recorded in the Bailiffs by First News. However, Lazada only issued a press release stating that it always strictly complies with the applicable law and will remove counterfeit products and counterfeit goods on its e-commerce trading floor. According to Mr. Nguyen Van Phuoc, the speaker representing for First News, said that although First News has continuously sent many official letters to Lazada for warning the acts of trading fake versions on this platform were discovered, there was no satisfactory response from Lazada. Finally, as said by First, to ensure its reputation, it still incurs the cost of paying for these poor quality products. One of the examples given by First News was the best seller book named “Many Times, Many Lives”, the sales for this book significantly dropped due to the impact of counterfeit books being sold up to 50% cheaper than the original price on e-commerce sites.

It is absolutely an important milestone in the legal battle concerning the book copyrights which is very hot matter these days. Under the present circumstances, there is the fierce controversy pertaining to the widespread sale of fake and pirated books on the Internet, which occurs most commonly on famous e-commerce sites. From the legal perspective, the fact on First News, as a publisher petitioned against Lazada – an e-commerce site, shall be a notable legal issue regarding the right to sue under procedural laws. Accordingly, it is undoubtable that Lazada is merely an intermediary exchange but not the entity which directly distributes or sells books to consumers. It can be seen that this is a completely new approach when First News and some publishers previously requested to deal with piracy establishments or websites that posted pirated books as online e-books.

Regarding the book copyrights, the State currently has a number of legal documents on the protection of intellectual property rights in the field of e-commerce. Specifically, according to Article 202 of the 2005 Intellectual Property Law: the Court is entitled to apply civil measures such as forcing organizations and individuals that commit acts of infringement of intellectual property rights to terminate the infringing acts, make public rectification, compensation for damages. Concurrently, according to Article 4.1(b) of Decree 52/2013/ND-CP issued by the Government on 16 May 2013, the use of e-commerce to trade in counterfeit goods is an act of prohibiting.

However, the First News’s petition was recently received by the People’s Court of District 1 and this petition shall be resolved at the First Instance stage under procedural laws. Given the above, it is undeniable that the legal battle related to the book copyrights will be prolonged and will open up many noticeable legal issues.

Reference links: https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/business/20200909/vietnamese-publisher-sues-lazada-over-fake-books-sold-on-platform/56661.html

Vietnamese link: https://tuoitre.vn/lazada-bi-first-news-tri-viet-kien-vi-ban-sach-gia-muon-kiep-nhan-sinh-dac-nhan-tam-2020090908524123.htm