1E9Ct5D

The judicial authorities must inform the INDAUTOR of any copyright proceeding that isinitiated before them, and, in fact, this Institute will be a party to such proceedings inthe event that any recording, annotation, or inscription in the Registry is contested.Regarding the handling of these kinds of proceedings, it must be pointed out that inthe field of civil law, all actions exercised must be legally grounded, processed, andresolved in accordance with the provisions of the LFDA, its regulatory provisions, and asa supplement thereto, the civil procedures codes. In addition to other kinds of claims inthis area, a claim for damages and losses can be filed with this procedure.In this regard, on July 23, 2003, a decree was published in the Official Federal Gazettewhereby the LFDA was amended to include, among other reforms, an article that, just asin the Industrial Property Law, provides that “the reparation of material and/or moraldamages, as well as indemnity for damages and losses for violations of copyright or ofrelated or similar rights, will never be less than 40 percent of the sale price to the publicfor the original product or for the original rendering of any kind of services thatinvolves the violation of one or more of the rights protected by this law.” 22In the case of criminal law, it must be kept in mind that crimes related to copyrightare set forth in Title XXVI of the Federal Criminal Code, 23 which in terms of such codeare prosecuted based on a complaint filed by the offended party 24 (except in the caseestablished in Article 424, Section I, which will be prosecuted directly by government__________22On this specific matter it is worth pointing out that recently the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nationresolved contradictory court opinions with regard to the indemnity for damages and losses resulting froman infringement of industrial property rights, which in this case would be applied by analogy, and in whichit was decided that before going through a civil procedure to claim damages and losses, there must be a rulingfrom the competent authority (INDAUTOR or the Mexican Industrial Property Institute) in relation to theviolation of the intellectual property rights on which such claim is based.23The following are among the most important acts considered to be crimes: (a) speculation in any form withfree text books distributed by the Ministry of Public Education; (b) the publication, production, or recordingof more copies of a work protected by the LFDA than those authorized by the copyright holder; (c) thewillful use, for purposes of profit and without the respective authorization, of works protected by the LFDA;(d) the willful production, reproduction, introduction into the country, storage, transportation, distribution,sale, or leasing of copies of works, recordings, videos, or books protected by the LFDA with the purposeof commercial speculation, and without the authorization that in the terms of the Law, the holder ofthe copyright or of the related rights must grant; (e) the sale to any final consumer on the street or in publicplaces, fraudulently, for commercial speculation, of copies of works, recordings, videos, or books protectedby the LFDA; (f) the exploitation for purposes of profit of an interpretation or a performance; (g) themanufacture, import, sale, or leasing of a device or system to decipher a coded satellite signal, programcarrier, without authorization of the legitimate distributor of said signal, or the carrying out for commercialpurposes of any act intended to decipher a coded satellite signal, program carrier, without authorizationof the legitimate distributor of said signal; and (h) the publication of a work substituting the name ofthe author with another name.24In the event the copyright has entered into the public domain, the complaint will be made by the Ministryof Public Education, which will be considered the offended party.239Intellectual Property