Cases of sharing articles online can be fined up to 30 million VND

Share with VnExpresson the sidelines of the Preliminary Conference on the field of electronic information, on the afternoon of June 24, Mr. Le Quang Tu Do, Director of the Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information, said that determining “whether there is copyright infringement or not” must depend on each specific case.

According to Decree 174/2026, effective from July 1, the act of providing or sharing journalistic, literary, artistic or published works without the consent of the intellectual property rights holder can be fined from 20 to 30 million VND. The Press Law 2025 stipulates that a journalistic work is the smallest constitutive unit of a journalistic product, with independent content and complete structure, including news and articles expressed in writing, sound or images.

Mr. Do explained, if a user simply reshares the link of an article on social networks, that is not a copyright violation. “The link is absolutely not a journalistic work, but just a link to that work,” he said.

When users share a link, others who click on it will be redirected to the press agency’s page to read the content. Therefore, sharing the article link is absolutely not a violation.

However, the case of sharing a link along with part or all of the article content is different. According to Mr. Tu Do, if a user reposts part or all of the article’s content without consent, this action may be considered copyright infringement.

Another common situation is the “cooking” of journalistic content. The poster did not copy verbatim, but took the main idea of ​​the article and rewrote it with different words. The Director of Radio, Television and Electronic Information said that this case needs to be considered specifically.

“If it is original information that only one news agency has, it is definitely a copyright violation,” he said. Meanwhile, with popular information that has widely appeared in many press agencies or been posted by many people, reuse is not necessarily a violation.

For example, the information “Hanoi is 40 degrees hot” is popular data, anyone can post it. But if there is an additional interview with a meteorological expert to explain the cause of the heat wave, this is the result of the reporter’s professional work. In this case, “people go to work and ask to get that information”. Re-cooking may be considered copyright infringement.

According to Director Le Quang Tu Do, copyright is an area where it is difficult to list all situations of violation because in reality there are many different situations. However, the principle is that the creator of the product has copyright and related rights. “Regardless of whether we use it for non-commercial or commercial purposes, we need to get permission from the owner of that right,” he affirmed.