Nhac Cua Tui’s Game Sharing Debacle Underlines Vietnam’s New Piracy Obsession

There’s been some buzz on the Vietnamese internet lately concerning Nhac Cua Tui, one of Vietnam’s premier music listening services. Nhac Cua Tui has two main domains, the .com domain, and the NCT.vn one. Nhac Cua Tui, which means “my music” in Vietnamese, has become famous for its almost Last.fm-like recommendation engine and music distribution channel. The service has been promising enough to receive funding from CyberAgent Ventures early last year.

But the latest controversy concerns Nhac Cua Tui’s NCT.vn domain, which is a platform for game developers and gamers to post their games online to share. It turns out that quite a few of the games posted on the site are unlicensed – meaning they’re pirated. As reported by Ictnews, Nhac Cua Tui has taken the position that they are not a game distributor, but just a platform for sharing.

This has caused a bit of a stir. In fact, licensing and legal issues have been getting more and more serious in the online space here recently, with Coke pulling its ads out of VNG’s Zing, and Bao Moi under fire from local Vietnamese newspapers for stealing content. In my opinion, it’s great. It’s forcing online and offline companies to take patents and copyrights more seriously, and the end result would of course be more support and respect for truly innovative ideas.

In light of this, I called up Nhan The Luan, CEO of Nhac Cua Tui, for more details on Nhac Cua Tui’s position. He said:

The central issue, as mentioned before, is that NCT.vn is a platform not a distribution channel. We’re involved in curation, so it’s not a central issue for us. Of course, what we will do is become more rigorous about what content goes on the platform and what doesn’t.