Electoral Candidates and Unauthorized Use of Copyrighted Characters

By Espinosa Bellido Abogados

Ahead of Peru's general elections of April 12, 2026, the country's intellectual property and competition authority stepped into the campaign arena — not to endorse any candidate, but to remind them all that copyright law applies equally on the campaign trail.

Peru's National Institute for the Defense of Competition and Intellectual Property Protection (INDECOPI) issued an alert after detecting what it described as presumed cases of candidates using fictional characters, songs, and other copyrighted works without proper authorization in their electoral campaign materials.

The most widely circulated case involved Baby Yoda (Grogu), the Star Wars character owned by Disney. A Senate candidate used a modified version of the character — adapted with a distinctive fringe haircut — in her campaign on social media. A separate AI-generated video, not confirmed to be of her authorship, also depicted the character in reference to her campaign. Reports further indicated that she had promoted Baby Yoda keychains featuring the modified design before removing the video.

A second case involved a candidate who conducted campaign appearances at markets dressed as La Chilindrina — the iconic character from the Mexican television series El Chavo del 8 — accompanied by a large doll representing the character.

Through its Copyright Directorate, the institute called on political parties and candidates to respect intellectual property during the campaign. The authority noted that the use of musical works, images, audiovisual content, texts, characters, and other creative content requires prior authorization from their rights holders or from the collective management societies that represent them, in accordance with Article 2, numeral 8 of Peru's Political Constitution and Legislative Decree 822 — the Copyright Law.

The authority further warned that unauthorized use of protected works not only harms the rights of creators, artists, and producers, but can give rise to both administrative and criminal sanctions. It also noted that parties and candidates could obtain the necessary authorizations through the collective management societies representing authors, performers, phonographic and audiovisual producers, and visual artists.

The issue was not new to Peruvian electoral politics. In 2021, the institute's Copyright Commission sanctioned a political organization with a fine of 6.43 UIT — Peru's tax reference unit — and ordered payment of USD 7,500 in accrued royalties, for infringing the economic rights of reproduction and public communication of a musical work used without authorization in a promotional video.

The episode illustrated a tension that has grown more acute as political campaigns increasingly rely on viral content, recognizable imagery, and AI-generated material to capture public attention. The ease with which copyrighted characters can be appropriated — especially through AI tools that remix protected content — created new enforcement challenges for IP authorities during the high-stakes, time-compressed electoral period, when the volume of campaign content was large and the incentive to cut corners was high.

For trademark and IP practitioners in the region, the Peruvian cases served as a concrete reminder that intellectual property rights do not yield to political expedience, and that the unauthorized use of well-known characters — however popular or locally adapted — carries legal risk regardless of the context in which they appear.