The Regulations to the Federal Law for the Protection of Industrial Property (LFPPI) are now in force. If you have an application pending or a portfolio to maintain, the practical rules have changed.
What Regulations do
The statute sets out rights and obligations. The Regulations set out how they are exercised: what a submission must contain, how deadlines are counted, what evidence is admissible, how electronic filing and notification work, and what happens when a formality is missing.
In day-to-day practice the Regulations matter more than the statute, because most applications are won or lost on procedure rather than on substance.
What to check now
If you have a pending application, confirm that the response deadlines you are working to still match. If you manage a portfolio, review the declaration of use and renewal calendar. If you have been served an office action, check the current requirements for the response before drafting it.
Why this affects foreign applicants particularly
Notification and representation rules are precisely the areas where an applicant without local counsel loses a case without ever seeing it. A notification is validly served, the deadline runs, and the file closes.
If you hold Mexican registrations and are not sure whether anything needs attention, a portfolio review is a short exercise and it is better done now than after a deadline passes.
The deadlines to re-check
Whenever the framework moves, the items worth verifying against your own files are the dates, because they are counted from events rather than from calendar years.
- Two months to answer a requirement, impediment or opposition, plus two more automatically on payment of the fee (articles 225 and 226 of the Mexican Industrial Property Law).
- One month to oppose an application after it is published (article 221).
- Ten years of protection counted from the grant, not from filing (article 178), renewed within the six months before expiry and admissible up to six months after (articles 237 and 238).
- The declaration of use within three months of the third anniversary of the grant (article 233).
Terms expressed in months run date to date and include non-business days, starting the business day after the notification takes effect (article 21). And notification by Gazette is effective on publication alone (article 20), which is the rule that catches holders relying on an email that never arrived.