At 3:24pm Wednesday August 29, in response to Nguoi Lao Dong’s recent attack on its service (UPDATE: Nguoi Lao Dong has pulled down the original news), the head of the Baamboo team gave a strong rebuttal on Dan Tri, disclaiming its responsibility for the ‘bad contents’ and affirming its effort to comply with Vietnamese rules.

At 3:53 the same day, an individual claimed himself to be part of the Nguoi Lao Dong reporter group that wrote the article on Dien Dan Tin Hoc. He then went on to explain the rationale behind what he thought to be a ‘necessary warning’. What surprised me the most is his obvious shift of emphasis from the censorship issue to the copyright issue in this first post. Things become clearer as he briefly apologized for the initial attack on the censorship (twice) and then discussed at length about how Baamboo, Zing MP3, 7Sac, and TuyetDieu violated Vietnamese copyright laws. The argument is pretty straightforward: these search-and-play music sites allow users to steal music from other ‘copyrighted sites’ such as nhacso.net, yeuamnhac.com and amnhac.timnhanh.com.

In terms of the censorship issue, I think it’s pretty clear that Baamboo does show great effort to filter bad contents. As a Vietnamese company, I don’t think it would like to be controversial like Google and Yahoo in China. It’s common business sense. The censorship filter is just a technical matter.

As I noted in the last paragraph in my previous post on Vietnamese online music websites, copyright will be a critical thorny issue sooner or later. I have to say that the alleged reporter’s argument does have some merits. If you want to be a music/video search site, help users find the music or video and then bring them to the original sites. That’s the whole point about search, isn’t it?

This discussion brings up many further issues: How does Vietnamese law define a copyrighted content website? This definition is not even clear in the US if you think of thousands of pending lawsuits. How about baomoi.com, where it also lets people read the content from other online news services right on its website (i.e. “its caching service“)? Or how about clip.vn, which also hosts various copyrighted contents from other mainstream media platforms? Do these two sites have the permission to SHOW the content on THEIR platforms yet?

My take is that the current Vietnamese law governing technology is *far* behind the real development. Plus, we also see the “leapfrog effect” effect in Vietnam. For example, it takes the majority of internet users in the US almost 10 years (plus all the web1.0 services) before they can use YouTube, MySpace or Facebook. In Vietnam, internet users jump to the latest technology of 2007. The combination of the already outdated legal environment, super-fast rate of adoption and popular always-on and rich content-friendly broadband use produces an huge gap between reality and IT law. While we see this legal issue in almost any business sector (and the government does openly admit this deficiency many times), it’s the technology field that presents the greatest challenge.