Lang Van Sues Hanoi’s BH Media in U.S. Federal Court Over Alleged Piracy of 5,252 Vietnamese Sound Recordings

Vietnamese-American label’s lawsuit, filed two weeks before USTR’s April 30 designation of Vietnam as a “Priority Foreign Country,” details ISRC metadata manipulation cited by USTR as a category of enforcement failure.

WESTMINSTER, Calif., May 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Summary: Vietnamese-American label’s lawsuit, filed two weeks before USTR’s April 30 designation of Vietnam as a “Priority Foreign Country,” details ISRC metadata manipulation cited by USTR as a category of enforcement failure.

Lang Van, Inc. (Vietnamese: Làng Văn), a Vietnamese-American record label founded in 1985, has filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Bihaco Communication Trading & Service Corporation (d/b/a BH Media), a Hanoi-based digital content company, alleging willful infringement of approximately 5,252 copyrighted Vietnamese sound recordings.

The complaint, filed April 16, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (Case No. 8:26-cv-00921), documents at least 8,068 separate acts of infringement during the three-year statutory period. It alleges that BH Media systematically stripped Lang Van’s International Standard Recording Code (ISRC) metadata from sound recordings and replaced it with codes registered to BH Media to redirect royalty payments from platforms including YouTube, Spotify, Meta, and Apple Music.

The lawsuit now precedes two significant developments: Vietnam’s May 15, 2026 criminal indictment and arrest of BH Media CEO Nguyễn Hải Bình and the USTR’s April 30 designation of Vietnam as a “Priority Foreign Country” (PFC), the most severe IP-related country classification under U.S. trade law and the first PFC designation issued in 13 years. Vietnam’s criminal action was launched under Prime Ministerial Telegram 38/CĐ-TTg, which initiated a nationwide intellectual property enforcement campaign following the USTR designation.

“For over forty years, Lang Van has been entrusted with the preservation of recordings that carry the cultural memory of the Vietnamese community,” said Lan Nguyen, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lang Van. “Vietnamese music is who we are. We are joining a fight that Vietnamese composers and Vietnam’s national music copyright authority have already been waging for years against one company that has repeatedly chosen to abuse that trust.”

Recent developments in Vietnam have brought broader attention to BH Media and copyright enforcement in the digital media industry. According to Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security, authorities charged Nguyễn Hải Bình and executives from several other entertainment companies with alleged copyright violations tied to the recording, editing, and online distribution of music content without proper authorization. Public reporting in Vietnam indicated that investigators initially estimated revenue from the alleged activity at approximately VND 6 billion (US$228,000).

The defendant has previously been sued in the same federal court in 2017 and 2021 by another Vietnamese-American rights holder, and is currently defending a parallel mass-infringement action filed in 2024 by LTN Media and Thuy Nga, producers of the iconic Paris By Night concert series. The Vietnam Center for Protection of Music Copyright (VCPMC) has separately filed multiple suits against BH Media in the People’s Court of Hanoi. BH Media drew national outcry in Vietnam in 2021 after its false copyright registration of the Vietnamese National Anthem (Tiến Quân Ca) caused the anthem to be muted during a live broadcast of a Vietnam vs. Laos football match, requiring intervention by Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The complaint also alleges that BH Media operated a sham music label called “SOXO” to assign fraudulent ISRC codes to duplicate copies of Lang Van’s recordings, and exploited Multi-Channel Networks to evade YouTube’s Content ID system.

Lang Van said its federal case differs in scope from the criminal proceedings unfolding in Vietnam. While Vietnamese authorities have largely focused on alleged infringement involving composition rights, Lang Van’s complaint extends to both compositions and sound recordings, including historic Vietnamese-American diaspora master recordings that were created outside Vietnam after 1975.

The company stated that the case seeks accountability for recordings associated with numerous diaspora-era labels, including Nguoi Dep Binh Duong, Thuy Anh, Kim Ngan, Cao Dao, New Castle, Bien Tien, Lang Van, and many others. Because many of these master recordings originated outside Vietnam, they generally fall outside the reach of Vietnamese criminal jurisdiction, creating a distinct legal dimension for Lang Van’s U.S. litigation.

Lang Van is seeking injunctive relief and damages, including statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willful infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c). The company is represented by Brandon J. Witkow and Cory A. Baskin of Woodland Hills-based witkow | baskin.

About Lang Van, Inc.: Founded in 1985 in Westminster, California, Lang Van is one of the oldest Vietnamese-American record labels in the United States and maintains one of the world’s most extensive archives of Vietnamese sound recordings. The company has been profiled in Woman’s World (September 2025) and Rolling Stone UK (October 2025).

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SOURCE Lang Van, Inc.

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