Mexican Senate Committees Advance IP Criminal Reform: Commercial Scale Replaces Intent to Profit, Up to 10 Years for Piracy

On 23 September the Mexican Senate's joint committees on Justice, Economy and Legislative Studies (First) approved, with modifications, the report on the bill sent by President Sheinbaum on 29 May 2026 to amend the Federal Criminal Code and the Federal Law for the Protection of Industrial Property; Milenio reports 25 votes in favour, 11 against and 2 abstentions, and the report now goes to the steering board for a floor vote. The core change replaces the intent-to-profit element of intellectual property offences with a commercial-scale standard: conduct is at commercial scale when its value equals or exceeds 170 units of measurement and update, calculated on the retail price of the genuine product (about 19,942.70 pesos), and shipments below the threshold are aggregated when made within 90 calendar days with the same or connected sender, recipient, delivery address or distribution network.

Producing, reproducing, importing, exporting, storing, transporting, distributing, selling or leasing at commercial scale copies of works, phonograms, videograms or books protected by the Federal Copyright Law would carry 4 to 10 years' imprisonment and a fine of 2,000 to 20,000 days; the same term applies to commercial-scale sales in shops, stalls or by electronic means, or where the activity is organised, systematic or repeated; selling free government textbooks would carry 3 to 7 years and 1,000 to 10,000 days' fine; and disclosing or distributing a work before its release becomes an offence. A new article 403 Bis of the industrial property law penalises commercial-scale use, reproduction, imitation or incorporation of public institutions' graphic identity, electronic domains or official signs to mislead the public, originally with 3 to 7 years and a fine of 1,000 to 10,000 units; after opposition warnings about online parody and memes, the committees confined it to commercial use of the identity of public institutions at the three levels of government with intent to deceive and reduced the term to 1 to 5 years. The government presents the package as aligning Mexican law with the USMCA, the TRIPS Agreement and the WIPO treaties; IP lawyer Mauricio Jalife notes in El Financiero that the bill also strengthens the procedural link with customs in detecting and seizing suspected infringing goods. The bill remains in the legislative process, pending the Senate floor and the Chamber of Deputies, and cannot be applied as law in force.

The practical significance of the reform is that the threshold for criminal liability moves from a subjective intent to profit to a quantifiable commercial scale backed by an aggregation rule aimed squarely at split shipments and small multi-point sales, which mirrors the USMCA intellectual property chapter's requirements on commercial-scale criminal enforcement and forms part of Mexico's effort to close enforcement gaps before the agreement's review. For rights holders the criminal route will rely more on proof of genuine retail prices and quantities; for companies operating in Mexico, any link in the supply chain handling infringing copies could reach the criminal threshold through aggregation. J&C recommends that companies selling, distributing or manufacturing in Mexico treat the commercial-scale threshold and the 90-day aggregation rule as a compliance line and check whether small cross-border parcels, contract-manufacturing orders and multi-point distribution could be added together; that brand owners prepare evidence of the retail price of genuine goods so complaints can be framed under the new standard once the law takes effect; and that all follow the Senate floor vote and the Chamber of Deputies without changing current enforcement strategies before official publication.

Source: www.milenio.com | www.excelsior.com.mx