New regulations on penalties for violations when using social networks take effect

Decree 174, issued by the Government on May 21, regulating penalties for administrative violations in the fields of postal, telecommunications, radio frequency, electronic transactions and information technology, officially takes effect from today. One of the contents of Decree 174 is the regulation on penalties for violations related to the responsibility of using social network services.

Article 95 stipulates a fine of between 20 million and 30 million VND for acts of "providing and sharing fake information, false information, distortion, slander, insulting the reputation of agencies, organizations, honor and dignity of individuals; taking advantage of social networks to produce content in the form of reports, investigations, and press interviews".

Account owners, content channel owners, community page owners, community group administrators on social networks who do not prevent or remove information that violates the law, information that affects the legitimate rights and interests of other organizations or individuals, information that affects children posted on their accounts, community pages, community groups or content channels when requested by competent authorities will also be fined 20-30 million VND.

For acts such as providing and sharing false information that causes confusion among the people, causes damage to socio-economic activities, causes difficulties for the operations of state agencies or people performing public duties, infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of other agencies, organizations, and individuals that do not reach the level of criminal prosecution, a fine of between 30 million and 50 million VND will be imposed.

In addition to fines, individuals and organizations must block accounts, pages, community groups or content channels.

Previously, similar cases were often handled according to Decree 15/2020, with a fine of 10-20 million VND. For individuals, the fine is half, equivalent to 5-10 million VND, so the average level of the frame is 7.5 million VND applied in practice before July 1.

Also according to Article 95, social network users are fined from 20 million to 30 million VND if "providing and sharing journalistic, literary, artistic, and published works without the consent of the intellectual property rights holder".

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". According to Mr. Le Quang Tu Do, Director of the Department of Radio, Television and Electronic Information, determining whether an act of sharing journalistic content violates copyright or not must be considered on a case-by-case basis. People who simply share the link of the article will not be infringing, but if they include part or all of the content, taking a screenshot or recording a video of the article "may be considered copyright infringement".

"Regardless of whether we use it for non-commercial or commercial purposes, we need permission from the owner of that right," the Director affirmed.

Lawyer Le Quang Vinh, Bross & Partners Law Firm, said that Vietnamese law has long recognized journalistic works as subjects of copyright protection. This right arises from the moment the work is created and expressed in a certain material form, regardless of registration.

According to him, the use of published works without permission or payment is only acceptable in specific cases prescribed by law, with the condition that it meets the correct purpose, scope, extent of use and the obligation to acknowledge the author and origin. "Proper citation is a necessary exception, but it is not an excuse to take back the core part of the article, post it almost verbatim, making readers do not need to access the original source or use another editorial's content to make money," he said.

Journalism content is becoming a free "input material" for many digital content business models. Lawyer Vinh cited a fan page that took the entire article and wrote "according to Twitter", a video channel that recited the article with a machine voice, or a news aggregator website that took titles, sapo and content from many newspapers to sell advertising.

According to the lawyer, if reusing content replaces the need to read the original article, causes a loss of traffic, reduces the ability to normally exploit the work or causes unreasonable damage to the rights holder, "it is impossible to rely solely on the attribution of the source to justify it," he said.

Trong Dat