An amendment to the Industrial Property Statute published on January 2010, and to the guidelines of the Mexican Patent and Trademark Office (MPTO) for the filing of new trademark applications will make the trademark filing process less formal than it used to be.

Mexican law was already quite liberal, when compared with most Latin American countries, regarding the formal requirements for power of attorney documents for trademark and patent filing, prosecution and maintenance. Mexican law does not demand notarization, consular legalization or Apostille on such documents. Now, the law is going a little further.

The MPTO will no longer request a power of attorney document in most trademark filing cases.

Instead, the MPTO will consider that the agent is authorized to file the trademark

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Mexico, as most civil-law countries, follows the first-to-file principle; it means that the first to file has priority to obtain the trademark registration, hence, to be acknowledged as proprietor of the trademark.

Nevertheless, Mexico acknowledges certain rights and defenses for the users of non-registered trademarks; Mexico also allows applicants to claim a date of commencement of use in Mexico, in order to obtain some benefits after the issuance of the trademark registration. In any case, these rights and defenses should not be construed as common-law rights (there is no common-law in Mexico) or exceptions to the first-to-file principle: the first applicant has priority to get the trademark registration, no matter who claimed the earliest date of first use or if the earliest applicant

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