Eight foreign-owned companies were found using unlicensed softwarevalued at more than 13.5 billion VND (643 million USD) by aninter-ministerial team that carried out a month-long inspection.

Alleight are manufacturing companies and four of them are Taiwanese whilethe rest are from mainland China, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland,and Thailand.

The illegal software included products owned by Adobe, Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, Lac Viet, and Microsoft.

TranVan Minh, deputy chief inspector of the Ministry of Culture, Sports,Tourism, said: "A huge number of illegal software was found during theraids on the eight large companies. Over a thousand copies of unlicensedsoftware were found in 493 private computers and were being used by thecompanies for their business operations."

Despite havingsufficient financial resources and a good understanding of the law, theeight had chosen to violate others' intellectual property rights fortheir own benefit, he said.

According to a report by theinspection team, company managers have signed the inspection minutesadmitting their infringements and pledging to remove all the illegalsoftware from their computers and legalise all their software.

Minhsaid that over the coming weeks and months the team would ensurecompliance by all businesses using illegal software after having beeneducated during the world IP Day campaign.

The inspectors weredrawn from the ministries of Culture, Sports, Tourism – which overseesthe IP regime — and Public Security and the inspection followed a WorldIntellectual Property Day awareness campaign in March.

TheGovernment has been an advocate for strong intellectual property rightsprotection as evidenced by the issuance of Directive No 36/2008/CT-TTgin 2008 against violation of IP laws.-VNA