Mexico. In 2017, the company Cablevisión filed a civil lawsuit against various individuals and the companies "Latamel Distribuidora" and "Compropago", for the theft (marketing and reproduction of signals without authorization) of their contents. This lawsuit was made before The 38th Civil Judge of Mexico City (CDMX), who, last May, issued as a precautionary measure the prohibition on the import and sale of the ROKU device in Mexico.
The measures have tried to be revoked since 2017 by Roku, Latamel Distribuidora, as well as by departments (HEB, Wal-Mart, Liverpool, CIMACO, Palacio de Hierro, Best Buy, Office Depot, Radio Shack, Sears, Sanborns, Coppel, and online stores such as Amazon, Mercado Libre, De Remate, among others) who seek to put the devices back on sale. However, the amparos promoted have been denied in District Courts and Courts of the CDMX, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Veracruz.
As a scoop, last week, Federal Judges in the CDMX and Torreón, denied amparos, which maintains suspension issued by the 38th Civil Judge of the TSJCDMX. With this, the prohibition of the import, commercialization and distribution of the Roku device in Mexico remains in force, since the devices can be used as an instrument "to violate the honest uses of commerce and the Federal Copyright Law".
Cablevisión on different occasions has pointed out that, "it is important that Roku makes adjustments to its software, as other online content distribution platforms have already done, so that it does not become the preferred device for criminals to retransmit stolen content, in addition to safeguarding the security of its users", but apparently that has not happened.
Although the decisions made in this process can still be appealed, it is the first time in Mexico that there are reports of local and federal courts that exercise criteria to combat digital piracy. At the same time, the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) has been blocking URLs (Internet addresses) that are used to distribute illegal content and applications, confronting the federal government and the courts in the fight against piracy to comply with International Treaties such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Berne Convention, on the protection of works and copyrights in the digital environment.
Text written by the Institute of Telecommunications Law, IDET.
