Overview
- The Comisión de Justicia approved the Senate-drafted minuta with 23 votes to 10 on Tuesday and forwarded it to the Mesa Directiva for debate and a plenary vote in San Lázaro.
- The draft adds article 402 Bis to the Código Penal Federal and amends industrial-property rules to punish, with one-to-five years in prison and fines of 1,000–10,000 UMA, those who use or reproduce institutional graphics, domains or official documents at a commercial scale with intent to induce error or commit a crime.
- Opposition lawmakers pressed for an explicit exemption for satire, parodies and memes but their amendment was rejected, leaving critics to warn the text’s wording is vague enough to be applied to caricatures, memes or journalistic uses.
- Supporters from Morena and allied parties defended the reform as an anti-fraud and intellectual property measure that aligns Mexico with international obligations and gives prosecutors tools to tackle cloned sites and official-branding scams.
- If the pleno approves the bill, creators, journalists and civic groups could face new legal risk while courts will likely have to define how terms such as “commercial scale” and “intent to induce error” apply in practice, a concern sharpened by past local cases where parody work led to sanctions.