The Inspectorate of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism on July 11 reprimanded two local  websites and requested them to remove all the copies of the films which were accused by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) of violating their copyright.

Nguyen Huu Minh, who runs http://phim47.com , and Nguyen Van Chung, owner of http://vlvn.com, were requested by the ministry to stop their violations altogether and remove all the violated copies within 10 days.

In April this year, the MPAA filed a complaint to the Vietnamese culture ministry, demanding that these two websites and another website http://pub.vn be penalized for their copyright breaches on many of the association members’ films including “Life of Pi” and “Lincoln”.

With sophisticated ploys, phim47.com and vlvn.com offer a host of violated films for free, while pub.vn charges viewers VND2,000 (US$0.1) each time.

MPAA represents major US film groups including Paramount Picture Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Twentieth Century Fox film Corporation, Universal City Studios LLC, Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.