Is information property under Vietnamese law?
In many circumstance, information (e.g. user data) is more important to a business than its physical assets. This leads to an important question about the legal nature of information under Vietnamese law. Under the Civil Code 2015, a property (tài sản) is object, money, valuable papers and property rights. Except for intellectual property rights (including trade secret and data compilation) which are clearly recognised as a property right, the law is not clear whether other types of confidential information can be regarded as property.
The Civil Code 2015 also recognises and protects “civil rights” (quyền dân sự). Civil rights can be established as the result of the business operation or production operation. Accordingly, in theory, information, which is created (or generated) from business operation or production operation, could arguably be subject to civil right of the relevant entity which creates such information. However, the problem is there may be more than entities which create the information.