An intellectual property market has not existed in Vietnam yet. However, such a market is taking shape and it is believed to become bustling in the near future.

The unexploited treasurer worth billions of billions of dong 

This is the patent database with the information about the inventions in Vietnam and in the world being stored in the server of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Pham Hong Quat, Deputy Director of the National Agency for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (NATEC) said at a workshop on building up and developing an intellectual property in Vietnam in early May that the digitalized database contains 39 million Vietnamese and foreign inventions. However, Quat said, the “treasurer” still does not catch the interest of Vietnamese enterprises.

A survey conducted by the World Bank on 350 Vietnamese enterprises shows that only six percent of inventions has been commercially developed or utilized in reality.

Vietnam still does not have an intellectual property market. According to NATEC, there are about 200-300 science and technology brokerage companies. Meanwhile, there are 60,000 in China and 20,000 in other countries.

However, in fact, Vietnamese enterprises might have utilized more inventions than that shown in the survey result. Vietnam needs to import most of the equipments and machines needed for production. Therefore, it has to import the technologies latent in the equipments’ prices. Meanwhile, for many reasons, the purchase and sale of intellectual property were carried out in quietness without any declaration.

Continue using stolen products?

Piracy has been quite common in Vietnam for the last many years. The Lac Viet dictionary, the manual for every foreign language learner, tops the list of the pirated software pieces.

It is estimated that six million people are using Lac Viet dictionary. Meanwhile, the number of clients of Lac Viet Informatics Company, the owner of Lac Viet dictionary, licensed to use the product is less than one percent of the figure. The only benefit the company has got from developing Lac Viet dictionary is the high prestige which allows the company more easily popularizing its other products.

Agriculture is the sector, where using pirated inventions has become very commonplace. Le Hung Lan, a well-known Vietnamese biologist, after spending many years in India and Vietnam to conduct scientific research works, successfully created Nang Hoa 09 fragrance rice variety which has a lot of advantages. 

Though Lan registered patent at the National Office of Intellectual Property, Nang Hoa 09 variety hit the market just after one year and at lower price.

“Cuc Tac”, the product patent No. 5874 - pre-cast concrete structure coded P.D.TAC-CM5874, is an invention of Dr Phan Duc Tac. However, no one knows that the product, which has been used widely from the north to the south, is invented by Dr Tac. Especially, the invention has been pirated not only by individuals and private enterprises, but also by joint stock and state owned enterprises.

It’s still unfamiliar to Vietnam that intellectual property is also a kind of goods. However, experts have warned the piracy would stifle the creativity of a nation and generate the "middle income trap" which would be very difficult for Vietnam to settle.

Intellectual property market, when?

Where there is demand, there will be supply, which would then create markets. However, scientists said that if the markets take shape spontaneously, the markets would be unprofessional which would have a lot of problems.

Therefore, they have urged to set up a legal framework for such markets to come out, stressing that the markets need to be set up as soon as possible. Vietnamese and foreign inventions, like other kinds of goods, would be debased as time elapses.

Source: Nong nghiep VN/ VNN