Safe harbour, Mexican waters
On 22 September, the copyright reform the press has dubbed the “Ley Antimemes” is expected to be approved in the Economy, Commerce and Competitiveness Committee at the Chamber of Deputies. Despite the nickname, the bill does not prohibit memes, AI-generated images or the sharing of modified content. Rather, it tightens the rules governing when internet service providers — including platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X — can lose their existing safe-harbour protection and become secondarily liable for copyright infringements committed by their users.
Deputy Raúl Bolaños-Cacho Cué opens a congressional session at the Chamber of Deputies. (Photo: Raúl Bolaños-Cacho Cué/X)
The initiative was one of two reform packages President Sheinbaum sent to Congress on the same day in May. A companion reform to the Federal Penal Code and the Federal Law of Intellectual Property Protection, covering trademark and industrial-property offences and predetermined damages of 340 to 50,000 UMA, went to the Senate. The internet-intermediary reform went to the Chamber’s Economy, Commerce and Competitiveness Committee, amending Article 114 Octies and adding Articles 114 Nonies and 232 Septies to the Federal Copyright Law. The government has framed the changes as bringing Mexican law further into line with USMCA, particularly Article 20.88’s rules governing limitations on internet-service-provider liability.
This matters because Mexico already has a relatively elaborate safe-harbour regime. Since the 2020 USMCA implementation reforms, providers have been required to remove infringing material expeditiously following a valid notice, operate a counter-notice mechanism and maintain a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat infringers. The new initiative makes more explicit what providers must do to retain safe-harbour protection and, importantly, when failure to do so can expose them to secondary liability for their users’ copyright infringements.
Under the proposed Article 114 Nonies, failing to comply with the requirements of Article 114 Octies is not enough on its own to create liability. A provider must also either contribute to, induce or cause the infringement with knowledge of it, or have the ability to control the infringement while receiving a financial benefit directly attributable to it. Those tests potentially matter to advertising-funded platforms such as Meta, YouTube and TikTok, although how broadly concepts such as “knowledge”, “control” and “directly attributable” financial benefit are interpreted would ultimately determine the reform’s significance.
The mechanism sits closer to the US model than the EU one. Under the DMCA, a US provider keeps its safe harbour by, among other things, removing infringing material expeditiously once properly notified and maintaining a policy for terminating repeat infringers’ accounts. Mexico has had similar requirements since 2020, but the reform makes the framework more prescriptive: Article 114 Octies would require the termination policy to be permanently published on the provider’s website and incorporated into its terms of service. The EU framework, set out under the 2000 e-Commerce Directive and developed further under the 2022 Digital Services Act, relies instead on notice-and-action mechanisms and broader rules governing platforms’ handling of illegal content. None of the three systems makes a general obligation to monitor all user content a condition for safe-harbour protection.
For Google, Meta and other global platforms, much of the required infrastructure already exists: they process copyright notices at enormous scale and operate sophisticated systems for detecting, removing and disputing allegedly infringing content. The greater impact may therefore fall on smaller platforms and hosting businesses that lack comparable compliance systems. For Big Tech, the more important question is legal rather than operational: whether the clearer Mexican secondary-liability standard creates greater scope for record companies, studios, collecting societies and other rightsholders to pursue platforms over infringements committed by their users.
A provider that fails to meet the safe harbour’s conditions faces sanctions of MXN117,310 to MXN4,692,400, set by the Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial, plus an additional 100 to 500 UMA for persistent infringement. The commission’s study cites more than 127 million infringing pieces of content taken down from digital platforms in 2023 and 2024 combined, according to the Asociación Protectora de Derechos Intelectuales Fonográficos, some 349,000 a day. The figure illustrates the scale of online copyright enforcement, although it does not resolve critics’ central concern: how broadly the new secondary-liability standard could ultimately be interpreted.
This also explains why the “Ley Antimemes” label is somewhat misleading. Memes, parodies and AI-generated images can incorporate copyrighted material and therefore potentially trigger copyright disputes, but the reform does not create a separate prohibition on creating or sharing them. Whether an individual piece of content infringes copyright remains a separate question. The bill instead determines when the intermediary carrying that content can lose its protection from liability for what its users do.
The substance of the proposal did not move significantly in committee: Article 114 Nonies still requires non-compliance with Article 114 Octies plus knowledge and contribution to the infringement, or control combined with a directly attributable financial benefit, rather than imposing automatic liability on platforms. What did move looks like a concession to lobbying platforms: greater clarity around the termination-policy publication requirement and a vacatio legis stretched to 180 days from publication in the DOF.
If approved in committee, the bill moves to the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, potentially as soon as this week, before proceeding to the Senate. For Google, Meta and other large platforms, it is therefore less a revolutionary “anti-meme” law than an incremental but potentially consequential tightening of Mexico’s existing copyright safe harbour: operationally manageable for companies that already run global notice-and-takedown systems, but legally significant if the new liability tests make it easier for rightsholders to pursue platforms themselves.
When “you never worked here” stops being the easy way out
When a worker sues for wrongful dismissal in Mexico, an employer can deny that an employment relationship ever existed, leaving the worker to prove otherwise. Until now, that defence could also create a procedural advantage if the worker had not submitted the relevant evidence with the original claim. On 17 September, the Supreme Court narrowed that route.
The Pleno resolved Contradicción de Criterios 17/2026, a dispute that had split two collegiate tribunals over a narrow but consequential question: once an employer denies in its answer that any employment relationship existed, when can the worker introduce evidence to prove otherwise? A tribunal in Villahermosa, Tabasco held that such evidence belonged in the original claim, full stop, citing Article 872 of the Federal Labour Law on the basis that workers cannot claim ignorance of their own employment relationship. A tribunal in Toluca, Estado de México took the opposite view: workers cannot be expected to rebut a denial before it has been made, so evidence filed at the réplica stage, responding to the employer’s contestation, should be admitted.
The Pleno backed the second reading, by five votes to two. A labour suit develops in sequence: the worker files, the employer answers, the worker replies and the employer can respond again. The majority held that demanding evidence of the employment relationship from the opening claim would effectively require workers to anticipate a defence the employer had not yet made. As justice-rapporteur Sara Irene Herrerías Guerra framed it, what the worker could not have known when filing was not whether they had worked there, but that the employer would deny it. The réplica therefore provides the opportunity to introduce evidence responding to that denial.
The distinction was not uncontested. One argument against the majority’s interpretation was that denying an employment relationship is a litigation defence rather than a new fact, and therefore should not create a new opportunity to submit evidence. The majority rejected that stricter reading, favouring a process in which the tribunal can consider the evidence relevant to establishing whether the relationship actually existed.
None of this hands workers an automatic win. Employers remain free to deny an employment relationship, contest the worker’s evidence and introduce their own at the contrarréplica stage. The criterion is also narrow: it concerns evidence establishing the existence of the employment relationship rather than reopening claims generally. Nor is the window indefinite. If the worker does not introduce the evidence at the réplica stage, the opportunity is lost. The tribunal must still weigh both sides and determine what actually happened.
What changes is an important procedural advantage. An employer’s denial can no longer keep relevant evidence out simply because the worker did not anticipate that denial when filing the original claim. Companies can still argue legitimately that someone was an independent contractor, service provider or otherwise not an employee. But they should now expect the worker to have an opportunity to put evidence of the alleged employment relationship before the tribunal in response.
That makes the ruling particularly relevant for companies relying extensively on contractors, freelancers and other arrangements where the dividing line between employment and independent services can become disputed. The substantive test for whether an employment relationship exists has not changed; what the Court has changed is the route by which evidence relevant to that test gets before the judge.
The stakes are not trivial. During the session, the Court cited INEGI data showing that, of almost 105,000 individual labour disputes filed last year before local jurisdiction, around 60 per cent involved an unjustified dismissal claim. The Court has therefore resolved a relatively technical procedural question, but one that can arise in a large category of Mexican labour litigation. Once the resulting jurisprudence is formally published in the Semanario Judicial de la Federación, lower courts will have a uniform rule on when this evidence can be admitted.
Aeroméxico’s data leak meets a regulator still finding its feet
After reports surfaced that a client database was being offered to third parties, Aeroméxico published a statement on 20 September saying it had found no exposure of financial data, card details or passwords, including for Aeroméxico Rewards. The airline said it had immediately opened an investigation to verify the information, establish its origin and determine the scope of any impact, and that operations had not been affected. It added that it would cooperate with the authorities and report any relevant developments, while warning customers to watch for unusual emails, messages or calls requesting personal or financial information.
The Anticorruption and Good Governance Ministry released its own account the same day. A forensic monitoring exercise had picked up a Telegram post from 18 September offering a database attributed to Aeroméxico: more than 15 million records in a 1.10GB file, including full names, emails, phone numbers, dates of birth and sign-up dates. The authority, headed by Secretary Raquel Buenrostro, extracted a sample of 100,092 records and found those fields, including the names of public servants and other public figures. It said the review fell under its powers pursuant to the Ley Federal de Protección de Datos Personales en Posesión de los Particulares, specifically Articles 54 and 55, and that it would now analyse the material to determine whether to open a formal ex officio investigation into responsibility for the exposed databases.
The leak was first flagged on 18 September by cybersecurity firm Silikn, which attributed it to the criminal hacking group “Eternal” and said the database might be linked to a breach disclosed in October 2025 by a separate group of hackers.
The bigger question is what this says about Mexico’s new system for enforcing private-sector data protection. Since INAI was abolished, responsibility has shifted from an autonomous regulator to the Anticorruption and Good Governance Ministry, part of the federal executive. A leak allegedly involving more than 15 million records is a good test of whether the ministry has the technical capacity, enforcement tools and credibility to investigate a major private-sector data incident and impose penalties where warranted. It also comes as the government continues refining Mexico’s post-INAI data-protection framework, making Aeroméxico an early benchmark for how the new system will work in practice.
CNBV tightens the screws on some non-bank lenders
The CNBV has pulled the plug on two non-bank lenders as stress in certain parts of Mexico’s Sofipo and unión de crédito sectors becomes apparent. The regulator revoked the authorisations of Sociedad Financiera Popular Acción y Evolución and Unión de Crédito Mexicano de Servicios Profesionales, with both resolutions published in the Diario Oficial on 17 September. Acción y Evolución lost its licence after failing to correct deficiencies in its net capital; Unión de Crédito Mexicano fell below required capitalisation levels. Both now enter dissolution and liquidation.
Meawnhile Protección Patrimonial Unión de Crédito is under regulatory investigation, and has stopped paying interest to an estimated 250 creditors and faces an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. Its crisis came into the open following the death in June of founder and CEO Carlos José Luciano Vélez Palomar. The CNBV had already conducted two investigative visits in late 2025, but after Vélez’s death the scale of the financial deterioration became increasingly apparent.
Protección Patrimonial’s past-due loan book reached MXN610.7m in June, almost six times the level a year earlier, while overdue unsecured loans jumped from MXN26.4m to MXN484.9m. Its delinquency ratio surged from 6.7% in March to 25.6% in June, while its capitalisation ratio collapsed from 10.52% to just 1.45%, far below the 8% regulatory minimum. The institution lost MXN124.9m in the first half.
The broader sector is not uniformly distressed. Uniones de crédito reported MXN2.58bn of past-due loans in June and an overall delinquency ratio of 4.92%, below the 5.79% recorded a year earlier. But the averages conceal pockets of severe weakness. Overdue unsecured lending more than tripled to MXN671.7m, with Protección Patrimonial alone accounting for 72% of it, while sector profits fell 9.9% as institutions increased provisions.
The end result is likely to be added regulatory and investor scrutiny of smaller non bank banks, with a flight to quality expected in the union de credito sector in particular. Observers are also asking whether the CNBV could have improved its vigilance before the crisis became public.
Chatter Box
Secretary Mario Delgado speaks at the presidential mañanera on 21 September. (Photo: Mario Delgado/X)
SEP takes action on cell phone use in schools. The Consejo Nacional de Autoridades Educativas (Conaedu) has agreed to restrict mobile phone use in primary and secondary schools during both class time and recess, permitting use only in emergencies. President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the measure at her morning press conference on 21 September, explaining that the agreement, reached by consensus with all 32 states, will be published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 22 September and take effect on 3 November, with the intervening month set aside for school assemblies to inform parents and students. Under the measure, phones and screens may be used only for emergencies or particular needs and should otherwise remain in students’ bags during class and recess.
Sheinbaum said the goal is to restore students’ creativity and curb indiscriminate screen use, particularly on social media, and that the decision followed consultation with national and international experts as well as the country’s 32 state governors. Education Secretary Mario Delgado said teachers are exempt from the restriction but will be asked to model responsible use for students. He added that the rules vary by education level: restrictions are total during the school day, including recess, in basic education; upper-secondary schools will promote responsible and safe device use, with specific limits left to individual institutions; and universities will face no restrictions, though responsible use will still be encouraged. Delgado said school assemblies will be held nationwide to communicate the new rules before they take effect.
Congress to debate nationality reform for executive office. Congress reconvenes on 22 and 23 September to take up a constitutional reform that would bar candidates with additional nationalities from the presidency, state governorships and the head of government of Mexico City. The floor vote will most likely confirm an outcome the committee stage already previewed. On 8 September, the Comisión de Puntos Constitucionales approved the initiative by 26 votes to five, with Morena, the Partido Verde and the PT in favour and the PRI and Movimiento Ciudadano opposed. The PAN’s five members walked out before the count, calling the process rushed and warning that it would strip political rights that Mexicans living abroad had spent decades fighting to acquire.
The text itself is narrow. It amends Articles 82, 116 and 122 to require anyone registering as a candidate for those three offices to hold Mexican nationality exclusively, renouncing any other beforehand. The arithmetic favours passage in the Chamber, but it gets less comfortable once the reform reaches the Senate. At least five PVEM and PT senators, including Luis Armando Melgar and Tamaulipas Senator Maki Esther Ortiz Domínguez, have questioned the measure on human rights grounds, arguing that it could infringe the right to be voted for among the millions of Mexicans in the United States who hold dual nationality. The PVEM’s coordinator, Manuel Velasco, has tried to smooth over the split, but the doubts leave the qualified majority the reform needs in the upper chamber genuinely uncertain, turning what looked like a formality into the more consequential vote of the two.
IMSS Retires the Paper Employer Card, and the Fine Print Is Where It Bites. From 23 September, the plastic employer identification card that Mexican businesses have carried into IMSS branches for years stops being valid. IMSS published the agreement in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 8 September, making the digital employer identification the only recognised proof of registration, retiring every physical card issued before it.
The mechanics matter more than the announcement. The Digital TIP is generated exclusively through Buzón IMSS, the institute’s electronic notification portal, authenticated with the employer’s e.firma. An employer who has never activated that portal, whether through oversight or a lapsed e.firma, cannot generate the card at all, and without it, a representative cannot complete the procedures before IMSS that depend on proof of employer registration.
The two-week gap between publication and enforcement leaves little room for firms that discover the problem late, since Buzón IMSS activation is not instantaneous and a misconfigured e.firma is rarely resolved same day. The substitution also follows a pattern IMSS and other federal counterparties have been running for a while, moving proof-of-registration documents into portals gated by a single credential, one that, if mishandled, can quietly cut a company off from routine dealings with the state. The practical task this week is less about reading the DOF agreement than about checking, today, whether Buzón IMSS access actually works.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani with CDMX Mayor Clara Brugada at the U20 summit in NYC on 20 September. (Photo: Clara Brugada/X)
Brugada visits the Big Apple. Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada met with Mayor Zohran Mamdani during her participation in the Urban 20 (U20) summit, held in New York City from 19 to 21 September and bringing together mayors, deputy mayors and representatives from 34 G20 cities to discuss affordable housing, climate change and migration.
At a joint press conference, Brugada argued that cities cannot become places only the wealthy can afford to live in, and that a genuinely democratic city is one where housing, transport, care and public space function as rights rather than privileges. Mamdani highlighted Mexico City’s Utopías programme and its Sistema Público de Cuidados; both mayors agreed that cities should serve as spaces of peace and refuge, and that the cities of the future need to be affordable to remain liveable.
Brugada has also said her administration will look to adapt some of New York’s practices to improve conditions for app-based delivery workers in Mexico City, proposing spaces where couriers can rest, access restrooms and recharge their e-bikes, after meeting separately with Mexican delivery workers based in New York. The meeting was one of several Mamdani held over the weekend with fellow left-leaning mayors, including from Canada, the Netherlands, Spain and France.
A 1974 disappearance reaches the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court (SCJN) has agreed to review a case concerning the 1974 forced disappearance of Rosendo Radilla Pacheco in Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero at the hands of army personnel during the Guerra Sucia or Dirty War; Chief Justice Hugo Aguilar said he considered the case of sufficient “relevance and significance” for the SCJN to take up the case. The Court will define the scope of the state’s obligations to search for Radilla, investigate his disappearance and guarantee the rights to truth, justice and an effective remedy, including what measures a court hearing an amparo can order, among them search plans, investigative steps and memory initiatives, without displacing the technical powers of the competent authorities.
The request, filed in 2024 and taken up by Justice Loretta Ortiz Ahlf, arises from an amparo en revisión brought by Tita Radilla, the victim’s daughter, against a 2024 ruling by District Judge Karla Macías, who placed the disappearance within a context of ‘state terrorism’ and ordered the federal attorney general’s office to advance its investigation. Review had been delayed after the FGR sought Justice Ortiz’s recusal in 2025 over an alleged conflict of interest; the Pleno rejected that challenge on 21 January.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found Mexico responsible for Radilla’s disappearance in 2009; no one has yet been tried over the case.
Contacto:
Laura Camacho
Directora Ejecutiva de Asuntos Públicos de Miranda