The Making of Intellectual Property Law in Vietnam

This book is about the making of intellectual property law in Vietnam across colonial and socialist space and time from 1864 to 1994. It provides a completely new, provoking narrative, disproving previously published scholarship which claimed that there was no intellectual property law in Vietnam during the colonial and socialist periods. In doing so, the book engages with an emerging field of historiographical inquiry into the intellectual property law history in Vietnam and worldwide, which investigates how and why the scholarship about the history of intellectual property law has been construed and framed as such within a specific period and space. This book is comprised of three knowledge components. The first involves the reconstruction of the lost intellectual property law from 1864 to 1994 in Vietnam doctrinally. Relying on newly discovered archives in Vietnam and worldwide, it unravels a corpus of statutory and regulatory provisions and interesting, at times contradictory, juridical decisions that governed and interpreted copyright, patent, and trademark. The second is the historiographical inquiry of the making of the intellectual property law history scholarship in Vietnam. This will answer the questions of how and why the particular histories had been construed and framed as such at a particular time. This involves the debate about sociopolitical ideologies underlying the meaning and application of the laws, most notably colonialism and socialism. Finally, the third engages with the theory of legal transplantation. It addresses a hypothetical question of colonial laboratory as a form of legal transplantation: a new concept that this book offers to the global scholarship. It demonstrates that the colonial empire had tried to use Vietnam as a laboratory for its legal reform and then transplanted the successful and feasible results back to the empire. This book explains the distinctively ideological principles underlying the understanding and application of the law.

Tran Kien (Associate Professor, PhD) is Senior Lecturer in civil law at the Faculty of Private Law, University of Law-Vietnam National University, Hanoi. An alumnus of Vietnam National University, Hanoi (LLB in 2007) and University of Glasgow (LLM in 2010 and PhD in 2015), Kien has led a number of national and international research into a broad range of legal issues including but not limited to constitutional law, human rights, immigration law; contract and property; copyright and freedom of expression; social media and cyber security law: reflecting his interdisciplinary approach, intertwining legal scholarship with the sociopolitical settings across time and space in Vietnam. His research on the conflict between human rights and intellectual property rights was recently awarded the highest scientific and technological prize of Vietnam National University, Hanoi, in 2021. He is leading a national research project (2023 - 2025) on the reform of property law in the context of the rule of law and market-based economy in Vietnam funded by the National Foundation for Science and Technology Development of Vietnam. Kien's works are also extended to community development and intervention projects in collaboration with local and international non-governmental organizations.