Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Legality of Intellectual Property in Vietnam

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

How and what are the Vietnamese people learning about intellectual property ("IP") law? In the last generation, Vietnam has received over $80 billion of foreign investment, most of it since joining the World Trade Organization and revising its legal codes to put IP law on the books. In action, law is not the source of most social regulation in Vietnam, and a concept of ideas as property seems foreign among the pirated DVDs and unlicensed software everywhere in Hồ Chí Minh City. Nevertheless, domestic and global brands proliferate in Vietnam, and global corporate employers introduce their habitual ways of talking and acting: ways that reflect certain proprietary relationships around ideas, and a place for law to organize those relationships. What is this cultural contact doing to the place of IP in Vietnamese society? And what might it be doing to the common place of law? This project analyzes the legality of IP law within engineering in Vietnam, which is currently being negotiated through the coming together of the disparate patterns of talk and practice of international employers or educators and of local engineers. The methodology includes semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation in a European-owned factory and in an English-language university in Hồ Chí Minh City. The research examines how engineers beginning their practice adopt or modify the patterns of talk or practice that give some ideas a proprietary sense, and that give law a place in those proprietary relationships. The interaction between different cultural practices amidst changing legality is fertile empirical ground for theoretical development in this area of simultaneous legal and social change. More broadly, this research engages debates on the policy of global IP protection by reframing the issue around the dynamics of the growing middle-class and professional groups outside the legal community in Vietnam.