In the last months, Mexico seems to be reinventing itself and has been living several changes in its regulations and institutions. One of the most important and recent, is the one related to telecommunications.

What for some people started as the need and effort of balancing as possible the economic competence between the big and the small players and avoid monopolies in the industry, it has come across as a very complex scenario on how and when is this objective going to be achieved in addition to a thousand special features.

For starters our country has decided to follow the American principle of "must carry- must offer" which refers to the fact that the content of the programs of broadcast' networks must be retransmitted by the cable television service providers and at the same time, broadcast' networks must make their programs available for the cable television providers. In general, must carry-must offer rules create an interesting rights and obligations to the parties' situation, aiming besides of a fair play among these competitors, to serve Mexican society by guaranteeing their access to contents of general interest through this tool that may preserve free circulation of information, especially considering that the number of subscribers of cable television is increasing and said subscribers are still interested in watching the traditional channels, there are some places in the country where broadcast's networks are not available, thereby people needs to pay for such service.

At a first look, these rules seem beneficial to the industry and of course to the Mexican TV viewers, since the legislators were careful enough to provide that these "interactions" would not, by any means, generate charges to the viewers, one of the positions that has survived to the multiple discussions on this matter and has not changed, mostly since our legal system recognizes that the broadcast' networks is a government concession and said services are of public and general interest for Mexicans.

Nonetheless the most important national broadcasters exposed a not foreseen yet serious problem: What happens to the copyrights and neighboring rights involved with these retransmissions? According to the provisions of the Mexican IP legislation, specifically those contained in the Federal Law on Copyright, holders of economic rights are entitled to decide the terms of commercializing, reproducing and distributing their audiovisual work, which is one of the most relevant rights, but somehow this situation was not taken into account at first or at least it was not clearly stated.

Considering the above, the legislators and the responsible Institute (Federal Institute of Telecommunications) recognized the need of setting coherent rules to this "must carry-must offer" with the copyrights and neighboring rights, thus, recently there have been declarations expressing both, on one side these concerns and on the other the need of establishing clear rules and guidelines regarding the fact that cable television providers shall pay royalties for the retransmitted contents, adding a quite difficult and wide limitation to this legal complex figure, such as "not damaging copyrights and neighboring rights", which definitely leads to an unthinkable number of problematic and unsolved situations and inquires, for example: Should there really be an economic consideration for retransmissions? How and who would determine how much it will be paid for these retransmissions? Does this measure really guarantee a fair play on telecommunications?

Thereby and notwithstanding the recent positive reactions from Mexican collecting societies, what its true is that due to the complexity of the subject matter the same does not seem solved and duly foreseen and regulated yet.

It is also certain that even though at first it was not taken into account, Intellectual Property in Mexico has achieved an unprecedented importance, even enough to polish the initial scene which was mainly an economic one and got everyone talking about what is going to happen with the new telecommunication's figure and the related copyrights and neighboring rights.

At the same time it seems an amazing opportunity for the involved characters, to do their homework and come with a set of coherent, intelligent, possible and proper regulations that helps the achievement of the objectives that brought us here at the first place, achieve progress and improvement in the telecommunication's industry and avoid monopolies but always guaranteeing the respect of the State of Law.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.