Mexico’s Senate approved the copyright reform that creates secondary liability for internet service providers on Tuesday 3 November 2026, voting 72 to 37 in favour of the bill in general. According to the Senate’s own account of the session, four amendments tabled by senators from the PAN and Movimiento Ciudadano were rejected, the text was then carried in the particular vote 70 to 37, and the decree was sent to the federal executive — President Claudia Sheinbaum, whose government proposed the changes in May to bring Mexican law into line with the USMCA, as TorrentFreak reports. Earlier the same day the Senate’s united Economy and First Legislative Studies committees had cleared the opinion 19 to 7, and the Chamber of Deputies had already passed the identical text in October. Mexican media have christened it the Ley Antimemes, after the objection that it will push platforms toward removing parody.
Strip away the nickname and the mechanics are narrow and specific. The decree amends article 114 Octies of the Ley Federal del Derecho de Autor and adds two new provisions, 114 Nonies and 232 Septies. Article 114 Octies already obliges a provider to remove, take down or disable access to material posted or transmitted without the rightsholder’s consent on its systems or networks, expeditiously and effectively, once it has actual knowledge of a presumed infringement. New article 114 Nonies, as quoted from the approved text by Excélsior, makes the provider answerable for its users’ infringements where it fails to comply with 114 Octies and, in addition, contributes to, induces or causes the infringing conduct with knowledge of it, or has the ability to control the infringing user’s conduct and obtains a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity. Where both limbs are met, the provider is liable for the same infractions as the user under article 231, and article 232 Septies puts the sanction in the hands of the Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Industrial: 5,000 to 40,000 times the Unidad de Medida y Actualización for most of the article 231 categories, 1,000 to 5,000 UMA for fraction VI, 500 to 1,000 for the residual cases under fraction X, and a further 100 to 500 UMA for persisting in the infraction. Excélsior puts the main band at roughly 580,550 to 4,692,400 pesos; TorrentFreak converts the ceiling to about US$250,000.
The safe harbour is now a document you have to publish
The other half of the reform is the condition attached to the shelter. A provider is not liable for damages to copyright owners provided it maintains a policy for suspending service to repeat infringers — and the policy has to be permanently published on the provider’s website, incorporated into the terms and conditions of service, and contain minimum mechanisms for notifying the user. What can be cut off is the connection itself, not merely an account, which is why Mexican coverage has focused on access providers such as Telmex and Izzi.
That matters to more rights owners than it first appears, because a great many brands are themselves intermediaries in Mexico: marketplaces, app and content distribution, user-generated campaign microsites, SaaS products that host customer material. If that describes any part of your Mexican operation, the safe harbour has just become contingent on an artefact and a workflow you may not have — a written repeat-infringer suspension policy, a counting rule, a notification step, and a retained record of each. It is cheaper to draft that now than to draft it after the first notice lands, and it is not something a US DMCA policy can be copy-pasted into: the publication and terms-and-conditions requirements are express.
What to change if you are the one sending notices
The gating fact in the new structure is knowledge, and knowledge is something you create. Because liability under 114 Nonies is predicated on a breach of 114 Octies, and the 114 Octies duty only starts when the provider has actual knowledge of a presumed infringement, the quality of your notice determines whether the provider’s inaction is ever actionable. Serve in Spanish, to the provider’s designated contact, identify the specific URLs rather than a category of content, attach proof of title, and keep a timestamped record of delivery. A vague notice is not merely weak advocacy here — it leaves the first element of the claim unproven.
Read the conjunction before you escalate, though. On the text as quoted, breach of the removal duty is not enough on its own; you also need inducement with knowledge, or control coupled with a direct financial benefit. Against a connectivity provider that simply sells bandwidth, the second limb is a genuine evidentiary problem. Against a hosting platform or marketplace that takes a cut of the transaction the infringing listing generates, it is considerably easier to plead. If you are building a Mexican enforcement programme, that argues for pointing the strongest demands at monetising intermediaries and treating consumer ISPs primarily as the audience for the repeat-infringer mechanism rather than as damages defendants. Our guide to IP enforcement routes at IMPI sets out how the administrative track runs, which is where these sanctions will be decided — not in a court.
Three unresolved points to plan around
First, nobody has defined a repeat infringer. The statute sets no number of accusations and no threshold, so each provider decides its own; counsel at ClarkeModet, quoted by Mexican outlet EL CEO, advises providers to check whether accusations actually hold up and to give users a chance to respond even though the law does not require it. For rights owners, the practical consequence is that your leverage will vary provider by provider, and will only become legible once the policies are published. Read them as they appear and calibrate.
Second, no court order is required before service is suspended; an opposition proposal to add one was not adopted. Senator Gabriel Elizondo warned during the debate that a household shares one connection, so one person’s conduct can take an entire family offline. Expect that to attract challenge, and expect platforms to over-remove in the interim. If your own marketing uses third-party music, images or film in Mexico, clear the licences properly now; the regime you are about to benefit from as a rights owner is the same one that will take your campaign down on a notice.
Third, the US comparison cuts the other way than people assume. TorrentFreak notes that the Supreme Court in March wiped out the billion-dollar verdict against Cox, with Justice Thomas writing that a company is not liable as an infringer merely for providing a service to the general public knowing some will use it to infringe — so failing the DMCA’s repeat-infringer condition does not by itself establish liability in the United States. Mexico has taken the opposite route and tied liability to the condition. For a programme that runs on both sides of the border, the Mexican leg may now produce faster intermediary cooperation than the American one, and that is a budget decision worth revisiting rather than a footnote. The same logic applies to how you word demands: where a DMCA notice is aimed at a safe harbour that forgives non-compliance, a Mexican notice is aimed at one that does not.
Two caveats on timing. The decree is not law yet — it has gone to the executive for signature and promulgation, and none of the accounts of the vote set an entry-into-force date. And the fines are expressed as multiples of the UMA rather than in fixed pesos, so the peso ceiling moves with each annual revision of that unit; quote multiples in your correspondence, not the 2026 conversion.