Víctor Fuentes / Reform Agency
Wednesday, February 08, 2023 | 18:45
Mexico City.- The Supreme Court of Justice confirmed today, definitively, that the automotive giant Toyota has to indemnify the Guatemalan singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona for using without permission and altering the song Jesús es Verbo no Substantive in the 2014 Toyotathon campaign.
After six years of litigation, the First Chamber of the Court ratified in all points, except one, the sentence that a unitary circuit court issued in December 2020 against Toyota Motor Sales of Mexico and Toyota Distributors of Mexico for violating the Law Federal Copyright Law (LFDA).
The Court, however, revoked the court’s order to compensate Arjona with 40 percent of the income from the sales of the Camry, RAV-4 and Sienna models, in the period from October to December 2014.
The foregoing, the Court clarified, because this rule of the LFDA only applies to direct sales of improperly used artistic work, but not of other goods.
Therefore, the unitary court must set the compensation with the help of specialist experts, a process that will take several months, and that may not result in the millionaire amount that would have been derived from a calculation based on the vehicles sold.
For the rest, the Court unanimously rejected all of Toyota’s arguments against the conviction for using Arjona’s song without permission, which were reviewed by the Ministers because the case was brought up by the highest court.
“This First Chamber considers that there was indeed an alteration to the original work Jesús es Verbo No Sustantivo whose authorship is attributed to Ricardo Arjona, for which reason full probative value must be granted to the opinion issued by the expert appointed by the actor, not so for what that it does to the rendered by the Toyota expert”, says the sentence.
The Chamber not only confirmed the copyright violation for the use of the song.
In a separate ruling, the Ministers also ordered the unitary court to re-review the violation of Arjona’s right to his own image because an impersonator who posed as the artist was also used in the campaign.
“It is evident that the inclusion of said character in the advertising campaign was not a causal or accidental fact, but rather that the intentions of the architects of the advertising campaign were to use Arjona’s image in order to reach as many people as possible. during its diffusion”, maintained the Court.
Although the circuit court must condemn Toyota for violating the right to one’s own image, the LFDA provides for the same mechanism for calculating compensation as for the unauthorized use of the song, so it remains to be defined if this would imply a cost additional or parallel for the company.
