For over a decade, the money side of Vietnamese creative work under the state umbrella ran on two ageing decrees written before smartphones dominated news consumption. That era ended this week. Nghị định 287/2026/NĐ-CP, which took effect on 1 September 2026, consolidates and modernises the royalty regime for six creative sectors — điện ảnh (film), mỹ thuật (visual arts), nhiếp ảnh (photography), nghệ thuật biểu diễn (performing arts), báo chí (journalism), and xuất bản (publishing) — and, for the first time, puts a hard price floor under the re-use of press articles in the digital age.
What the document is
Nghị định 287/2026/NĐ-CP was issued by the Government on 17 July 2026 and entered into force on 1 September 2026. Spanning 7 chapters and 21 articles, it replaces two long-serving decrees: Nghị định 18/2014/NĐ-CP on nhuận bút (author remuneration) in journalism and publishing, and Nghị định 21/2015/NĐ-CP on nhuận bút and thù lao for film, visual arts, photography, theatre, and other performing arts. Even the vocabulary changes: the old decrees’ “nhuận bút, thù lao” gives way to “tiền bản quyền” (copyright royalties), aligning the payment regime with the amended Luật Sở hữu trí tuệ’s treatment of copyright as an economic asset.
The decree’s scope covers two situations: royalties for works created with state budget funding (commissioned, task-assigned, or tendered), and royalties for the exploitation of works whose copyright the State owns or represents. Given how much of Việt Nam’s press, broadcasting, publishing, and performing arts sector operates with state funding or under state ownership, that scope reaches most professionally produced Vietnamese content.
What changes compared to before
The structural change is a shift from a one-phase to a two-phase model. The Copyright Office of Việt Nam (Cục Bản quyền tác giả) notes that the 2014 and 2015 decrees dealt almost entirely with paying creators at the moment of creation, and said nearly nothing about what happens when the finished work goes on to earn money. Nghị định 287 fills that gap with explicit rules for the exploitation phase — licensing, republication, broadcast, digital distribution, merchandise.
The headline rule for the digital content economy sits in Article 15: anyone re-using (khai thác lại) a published press article — print or electronic — must pay a royalty of no less than 20% of the original creation royalty. The actual price is negotiated between the copyright holder and the user based on frequency, duration, placement, purpose, scope, format, medium, and revenue, but the floor is now law. Under Nghị định 18/2014 there was no minimum at all, which in practice meant widespread free or token-priced republication.
Broadcast gets its own arithmetic: first-time radio and television broadcasts follow minimum royalty frameworks, re-broadcasts are negotiated separately, and non-revenue broadcasts pay a reduced 30% of the standard framework. A notable exemption survives: state-represented works can be re-used without permission or payment for non-commercial communication aimed at children, ethnic minorities, and remote or border areas — with attribution required.
Two mechanisms are entirely new in spirit. First, profit-sharing: when a state-owned copyright generates commercial returns, the original creators can receive incentive payments of up to 10% of the profits. Second, incentive royalties of roughly 5–30% extra for priority content — works for children, ethnic-minority-language content, traditional art forms such as tuồng, chèo, and cải lương, works created in dangerous conditions, and accessibility content. Field-specific frameworks add further detail: Thanh Niên reports that screenwriters earn 2.25–2.75% of production costs, playwrights 4.2–6% of ticket revenue, and music royalties split 70% to the composer and 30% to the lyricist.
Who it affects
Journalists and press agencies gain the most immediate leverage. State-affiliated newsrooms — the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese media — now have a statutory basis to charge for republication of their archives, and a floor below which they cannot be pushed. News aggregators, content sites, and platforms that have built businesses on re-publishing Vietnamese press content now face a defined cost of doing business. Broadcasters, publishers, theatres, and film studios working with state funds must restructure their royalty accounting around the new frameworks, including the digital-specific rules for electronic publications. Individual creators — writers, photographers, composers, screenwriters — get clearer, generally higher, and better-enforced payment terms, plus a share of downstream profits that simply did not exist before.
Practical implications
For businesses, the near-term work is contractual. Any agreement that involves re-using Vietnamese press content — content syndication, media monitoring products, corporate news digests — should be reviewed against the 20% floor. Publishers and broadcasters need cost schedules approved under the new frameworks before commissioning work. For the many websites that quietly scrape and republish Vietnamese news, the decree converts a copyright grey zone into a priced obligation, and it lands in the same season as the year’s other digital enforcement decrees — the data-protection fines of Nghị định 330 and the cybersecurity rulebook of Nghị định 333.
Open questions
The decree sets the floor but not the enforcement path: how a provincial newspaper actually collects from an offshore aggregator, or how “the original creation royalty” is computed when the source publication never formally priced it, will be worked out in practice. It is also unclear how the framework applies to bulk machine re-use — text scraped for AI training or automated summarisation — which fits nobody’s definition of a negotiated republication. And because the decree is anchored to state-funded and state-owned works, purely private creators still rely on the general Luật Sở hữu trí tuệ rather than these frameworks. The first licensing disputes of the autumn will show whether the 20% floor holds in the market or remains a number on paper.
Sources
- Quy định mới về tiền bản quyền trong lĩnh vực báo chí — Báo Chính phủ
- Ban hành Nghị định quy định về tiền bản quyền: Điện ảnh, mỹ thuật, nhiếp ảnh, nghệ thuật biểu diễn, báo chí, xuất bản — Cục Bản quyền tác giả
- Nghị định số 287/2026/NĐ-CP: Hoàn thiện cơ chế tiền bản quyền — Cục Bản quyền tác giả (Phần 1)
- Nghị định số 287/2026/NĐ-CP: Quy định tiền bản quyền phù hợp với đặc thù từng lĩnh vực — Cục Bản quyền tác giả (Phần 2)
- Từ 01/9/2026, khai thác lại bài báo phải trả ít nhất 20% tiền bản quyền sáng tạo — LuatVietnam
- Từ 1.9: Bước ngoặt ‘cởi trói’ tiền bản quyền cho giới văn nghệ sĩ và báo chí — Thanh Niên
This post is general information, not legal advice.