Vietnam's government has introduced the country's first legally defined minimum royalty rate for reusing press content, effective September 1, 2026. Under Decree 287/2026/NĐ-CP, anyone who reproduces articles from print or digital outlets must pay at least 20% of the original content's creation fee — marking a significant shift from a system where royalties were theoretically owed but practically unenforceable.
What the 20% Floor Actually Means
Before Decree 287, Vietnam's Intellectual Property Law required permission and payment for content reuse but set no minimum amount. The gap left room for token payments — or simply a source credit line — that provided no real compensation to publishers. The new decree closes that loophole by anchoring fees to the original production cost of a work.
The calculation is straightforward: if a news organisation paid 5 million VND to produce an article, the minimum licence fee for reuse is 1 million VND. That figure is a floor, not a flat rate. Lawyers advising on the decree note that final fees will be negotiated based on the number of uses, duration, platform, geographic scope, and actual advertising revenue generated from the republished content.
Who Must Pay — and for What
The decree targets commercial exploitation of press content, not casual sharing. Conduct that triggers payment obligations includes copying an entire article or its essential structure, republishing photos, videos, or graphics without permission, deploying automated scraping tools to aggregate content for ad monetisation, and using AI to paraphrase text while preserving the original creative core.
A common misconception is that AI-rewritten content automatically avoids copyright liability. Ho Chi Minh City Bar Association lawyer Hoang Ha has clarified that if a rewrite exploits the creative substance of an original work — even with different words — the reuser still needs authorisation and must pay. Similarly, simply writing
