Hoteliers may be violating music copyright laws unless they agree to pay licensing fees, says Vietnam's performing rights organization.
The Vietnam Center for the Protection of Music Copyright (VCPMC) recently requested payments from hotels in Da Nang for using music in their business operations, reports Phap Luat Online.
Specifically, the hotels were told to cough up VND25,000 (US$1) for each room equipped with a TV per year. If they failed to do so by May 10, legal measures would be taken.
Dinh Trung Can, VCPMC's southern representative, explained to Tuoi Tre that hotels should have to pay because they often play music in both public and private spaces. Hotel guests, he claimed, can also use the TV in their room to watch music channels or entertainment programs which contain copyrighted music.
The organization is currently obliged to collect royalty checks for over 4,000 Vietnamese and four million international songwriters.
VCPMC's ultimatum came as a surprise to many hoteliers in Da Nang. "This is absurd. The TV is for guests to watch television programs; it is not a music player," a hotel owner told the news source.
“This may not be a large sum of money but it is completely unreasonable,” Tran Thanh Quy, general manager of the Sun River Hotel, chimed in, adding that many hotels had already paid subscription fees to cable TV providers.
In response to these comments, the VCPMC's Can clarified: “The subscription fee a hotel pays a cable TV provider only includes the cost of receiving their transmission signal and has nothing to do with the copyright licensee fee of any music used in the programs."
The same scheme has been enacted in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for ten years now, VCPMC's director and songwriter Pho Duc Chinh told VTC.vn.
Tran Hung, a lawyer from Da Nang, pointed out that VCPMC's claim to royalty payments was in accordance with Vietnam's copyright laws, but the organization should think twice about who to collect money from. "I think that they should be targeting television networks," he told Zing.vn in Vietnamese. "Citizens and hoteliers are only those who pay to watch TV".
[Photo via CNBC]
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