​The Death of Authorship: How Clause 7.5 of the IP Law Endangers Việt Nam’s Creative Class

Recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has moved from the margins of creative life to occupy the artistic sphere at unprecedented speed. From visual art and music to cinema and design, algorithm-generated products are becoming increasingly sophisticated, accessible, and widely consumed.

​Amid this wave, an urgent question emerges: is human-created art—imbued with emotion, lived experience, and personal reflection—now at a disadvantage against machine-optimized products?

​Clause 5, Article 7 of the draft amended Law on Intellectual Property (hereafter the IP Law) reads like a fatal shot aimed at the survival of intellectual labor, a field that has long been undervalued in Việt Nam. [1]

​Specifically, the clause stipulates:

​“5. Organizations and individuals may use lawfully published texts and data related to objects of intellectual property rights that are accessible to the public for the purposes of scientific research, experimentation, and training artificial intelligence systems, provided that such use does not unreasonably affect the legitimate rights and interests of authors or intellectual property rights holders as prescribed by this Law. The Government shall provide detailed regulations for this clause in cases where the texts and data are protected by copyright and related rights.”

​Essentially, this clause permits the use of lawfully published data to train AI models—a practice previously unregulated—provided it does not cause “unreasonable harm” to the rights holders.

​So what is the potentially fatal blow hidden in Clause 7.5?

The Death of Authorship and Creative Exclusivity

Imagine an author falls in love, and that inescapable passion becomes the wellspring of their inspiration. They create a character imbued with specific experiences, longing, and memories—a work bearing an unmistakable personal imprint. Then, suddenly, that work is harvested by AI as training data. It generates thousands of derivative variations that flood the market. Fragments of this creation—eyes, hair, cheekbones—are dispersed across countless AI products, generating revenue for others.

The horror is that the original author receives not a single đồng for their intellectual labor or the personal memories poured into the work. Because it is an AI-generated product, the original data source becomes untraceable.

​Worse still, third parties can use these AI outputs to construct narratives the original author never approved, or attach messages that contradict the creator’s intent. The artist loses not only profit but the right to control the fate of their own work. What AI strips away is authorship itself. The moral rights and distinct identity of the author are effectively stolen in plain sight, while lawmakers actively design provisions permitting this appropriation.

​This contradicts rights already recognized by law. The IP Law defines copyright as “the right of organizations and individuals over works they create or own.” (Clause 2, Article 4) Its essence is an automatic protection mechanism granted to prevent unauthorized use and commercial exploitation. Furthermore, under the Berne Convention, copyright arises the moment a work is fixed in a material form, regardless of whether it is registered or published. [2]

​In a country where legal mechanisms to protect intellectual output remain underdeveloped, drafting amendments to the IP Law should require extreme caution. Yet, in a startling move, Việt Nam’s legislators have chosen to allow AI to use existing internet data for training purposes—including data protected by copyright.

Through the Lens of Data Rights

​A fundamental question must be asked: should a product born of creativity and intellect be protected under data rights?

​Many existing legal frameworks equate “data” with “information.” For example, Article 4 of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) defines “personal data” as any “information” relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. [3] In Việt Nam, Decree 13/2023 internalizes this definition, treating personal data as “information” (symbols, letters, numbers, images, sounds) associated with or identifying a specific individual, regardless of the medium. [4]

​From this perspective, the link to copyright is evident. Under Article 12 of the IP Law, an author is the person who directly creates a work. When a work is born from a creator’s mind, it is essentially “information” arranged and expressed in material form. Therefore, a work is not merely a physical object; it is information tied to a specific person, qualifying it as “data” under current legal thought.

Hence, published work is not neutral information. It bears personal traces that allow for the identification of its creator.

​The convergence between copyright and personal data protection lies in a shared goal: preventing the exploitation of human-linked information without the subject’s control. When a work is used as training data, the exploitation targets not only the creative output but also the author’s identity, style, and intellectual assets.

​Consequently, Clause 5, Article 7 of the IP Law runs counter to core GDPR data protection principles—specifically, that data may only be processed with the subject’s consent (Article 7 GDPR), and that such processing must be lawful, fair, and transparent (Article 5 GDPR). [5] [6]

The Cheapening of Intellect

​A bitter reality persists in Việt Nam: intellect and intellectual labor have consistently been undervalued. This disregard is not limited to the general public; it permeates the halls of power, as evidenced by the draft IP Law.

​Is the legalization of the “right” to appropriate data merely a symptom of AI expansion? No. AI is not the root cause. This law is the inevitable product of a mindset that prioritizes short-term profit and devalues intellect. Creative pursuits demanding deep reflection and lived experience—such as the anguish within the poem Màu tím hoa sim—are now at risk of being fed to machines for mass reproduction. Works shaped by a lifetime of contemplation are being forced to kneel before the altar of efficiency.

​Consequently, Vietnamese intellectuals, already scraping by on meager wages, face the risk of total irrelevance.

​As previously argued, personal data rights are fundamentally property rights. [7] Institutional economics dictates that a nation’s prosperity is built upon the robust protection of these rights. When ownership is clear and enforceable, individuals are incentivized to invest, innovate, and create long-term value. Conversely, if people fear that their labor will be expropriated, they will not engage in high-value economic activities. If one does not own something, one cannot care for it with genuine commitment.

​If society continues to demean creativity, Việt Nam’s dreams of producing a Nobel laureate or an Oscar winner will remain fantasies. The prevailing short-term mentality is so deep that people readily spend 50,000 đồng on a cup of milk tea for fleeting pleasure, yet hesitate to spend the same amount on a serious research journal or a literary work. Milk tea offers immediate, tangible gratification; art and intellect seep in invisibly, even when creators extract marrow from their bones to bring them into existence.

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Đan Thanh wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on Dec. 30, 2025. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.