"El Pato Merlín" started as a costumed street character in Mexico City and became an unofficial ambassador of the 2026 World Cup, with a reach that money cannot buy.
In the digital era, popularity of that kind converts into commercial value almost immediately: merchandise, endorsements, appearances, licensing. The question is who legally owns the thing generating the value.
Three separate rights in one character
A character like this involves at least three layers. The name can be a trademark. The visual design of the costume and the character can be protected by copyright as an artistic work, and registered with INDAUTOR. The performer image is a personality right belonging to the person inside the costume.
These can end up in different hands. A producer may own the design, a manager may have filed the name, and the performer may have signed away nothing at all. When the money arrives, so does the dispute.
What creators should do first
Register the copyright in the character design, file the name as a trademark in the classes where you will sell, and put the relationship with anyone who helped create or perform it in writing before it is worth arguing about.
Fame is not a legal title. The register is.
Which right does which job
A character sits at the intersection of three separate protections, and creators usually rely on only one.
- Copyright protects the drawings themselves from the moment they were created, registered or not (article 162 of the Mexican Federal Copyright Law).
- A trademark protects the name and the logo as commercial signs, for the classes you register, renewable indefinitely while in use.
- A reservation of rights before Indautor protects the character as a character, with its name and its identity, which is the thing licensing deals are actually written about.
The reservation is the one most often missing, and it is the one that makes the asset clean enough to license. It also has to be kept alive: reservations run for a defined term and have to be renewed, and the terms differ by category, which is exactly why they lapse.