‘Copy-Rites’ in Vietnam Before the 19th Century

Abstract The temptation to try to identify modern legal concepts in premodern societies is an old and persistent one. Today, copyright law creates the concepts of individuality, originality, ownership, and legal entitlement to the fruits of mental labor. Whether such a complex could, in any meaningful sense, be said to have existed in non-Western premodern societies remains a deeply contested question. Imperial Vietnam, for example, was a society steeped in Confucian values, while also being dynamically adaptive and historically distinctive. Scholars have long recognized that even imperial China, the fountainhead of Confucian civilization, did not develop intellectual property law as it is understood in the West. Largely relying on Alford's, Yu's and Shi's arguments, I seek to present an equally complicated case of Vietnam. It imported Confucianism but did not simply replicate Chinese models. Vietnamese Confucianism developed both similar and distinct practices of literacy, printing, and textual authority, in which certain early signals of what modern law would recognize as copyright can arguably be detected. The purpose of this article is to critically examine whether, and in what sense, there was ‘copyright’ in imperial Vietnam. Obviously, it would be a mistake to assume that similarity in practice implies similarity in concept. It is perhaps overambitious to expect the same kind of ‘ownership’ of creations back in imperial Vietnam. Instead, I merely aim for little hints of copyright at its most aboriginal appearance, like the very first whispers of how people might have felt about their work being special.