Talk «Sở hữu Trí tuệ trong Sản phẩm Sáng tạo»

   A loom pattern from a craft village ends up on a T-shirt, a workshop technique turns into a fashion collection, and the story of a trade becomes a brand campaign. For Vietnamese design that is good news, yet the rules for such borrowing are still missing. In Hanoi, artisans, designers, lawyers and business owners are invited to sit around one table and work out where the line runs.

   The Vietnamese title of the talk means “Intellectual Property in Creative Products”, and the organisers put their questions bluntly. Who owns a traditional motif? Can the technique of a craft village be protected at all, and through which legal mechanism? How is an artisan credited and safeguarded when their knowledge goes into a commercial product? The last thread of the afternoon is the border between inspiration and cultural appropriation.

   Key facts

   Hoàng Long Huy — Head of the Cultural Industries Management Division at the Department of Cultural Industries and Copyright, Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, with a background in international cooperation on copyright, related rights and industrial property assessment.
Trần Tuyết Lan — General Director of the social enterprise Craft Link, with 30 years of work on preserving traditional crafts and building sustainable livelihoods with artisan groups and ethnic minority communities.
Bùi Hoa Hạ — Deputy Head of Discipline and lecturer in Design Studies at the School of Communication and Design, RMIT University Vietnam.
Moderator — Nguyễn Tú Hằng, Director of Hanoi Grapevine.

   The talk is aimed at everyone working where heritage meets contemporary design: artisans and workshops, designers, brand and small-business owners, design teachers and students. If you build Vietnamese motifs into your product, this is one afternoon where you can hear the ministry position, the practice of a social enterprise and the university view side by side, and see which steps protect both you and the maker.

   It belongs to the series “Thay Đổi với Sự Tôn Trọng” (“Change with Respect”), an initiative that tries to build a fair and ethical framework of cooperation between artisans, designers and the country’s creative community. The series runs within the programme of the Hanoi Creative Design Festival (Lễ hội Thiết kế Sáng tạo Hà Nội 2026).

   Attendance is by advance registration: the form asks for your name, contacts, age and field of work or study, and its last question invites you to send a question to the speakers beforehand. The organisers say nothing about a participation fee, so it is worth clarifying that when you sign up. The conversation is held in Vietnamese, and no translation is announced.

   A subject usually raised after the fact, in a lawyer’s office, is being put on a shared table before the conflict starts. That makes it a good afternoon to come with your own question and hear an answer from the people who write the rules and live by them.