Establishing copyright is the starting point of the entire copyright protection mechanism for online journalistic works. However, current Vietnamese law does not define online journalistic works as independent legal objects; the establishment of rights still relies on a combination of the Intellectual Property Law and the Press Law. This article analyzes the current legal situation regarding the basis for the creation of rights under the principle of automatic protection, the conditions for protection linked to the boundary between “purely factual news” and creative works, as well as the mechanism for determining the rights holder in the context of multimedia online journalistic products with multiple participating entities. The article also examines the new regulations on establishing intellectual property rights for products using AI systems under the Intellectual Property Law and Decree No. 134/2026/ND-CP. The results show that while the law has significantly improved, gaps remain regarding digital evidence of the time of creation, criteria for distinguishing creative works from pure news, and criteria for determining the level of human creative contribution when assisted by AI. Based on this, the article proposes developing an electronic registration and a batch registration mechanism to provide more convenient evidence for proving rights in the event of disputes.

Keywords: copyright establishment, electronic journalistic works, automatic protection, copyright holder, artificial intelligence.