Eight foreign-owned companies were found using unlicensed software
valued at more than 13.5 billion VND (643 million USD) by an
inter-ministerial team that carried out a month-long inspection.

All
eight are manufacturing companies and four of them are Taiwanese while
the rest are from mainland China, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland,
and Thailand.

The illegal software included products owned by Adobe, Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, Lac Viet, and Microsoft.

Tran
Van Minh, deputy chief inspector of the Ministry of Culture, Sports,
Tourism, said: “A huge number of illegal software was found during the
raids on the eight large companies. Over a thousand copies of unlicensed
software were found in 493 private computers and were being used by the
companies for their business operations.”

Despite having
sufficient financial resources and a good understanding of the law, the
eight had chosen to violate others’ intellectual property rights for
their own benefit, he said.

According to a report by the
inspection team, company managers have signed the inspection minutes
admitting their infringements and pledging to remove all the illegal
software from their computers and legalise all their software.

Minh
said that over the coming weeks and months the team would ensure
compliance by all businesses using illegal software after having been
educated during the world IP Day campaign.

The inspectors were
drawn from the ministries of Culture, Sports, Tourism – which oversees
the IP regime — and Public Security and the inspection followed a World
Intellectual Property Day awareness campaign in March.

The
Government has been an advocate for strong intellectual property rights
protection as evidenced by the issuance of Directive No 36/2008/CT-TTg
in 2008 against violation of IP laws.-VNA