Here at AROC we LIVE the pleasure of helping the local artistic community of Panama with all the Intellectual Property advise they need in the so competitive world of living from their talent. 
Rolo De Sedas is one of the most popular visual artists in Panama. Don’t forget to visit his website rolodesedas.com to look at his colorful and beautiful artwork that is so representative of our Panamanian and Caribbean roots.

Rolo was one of the first artists in our country to innovate in the application of his art. While producing, exhibiting and selling his paintings, Rolo also started to create merchandise with his artwork printed on it: clothing, pins, key-chains, stickers, and more.

After years of artistic activeness, Rolo had a happy and difficult international experience at the same time last year over his artwork and its copyrights. Rolo was invited to a beautiful event in Argentina: the city of Cordoba honored him by installing a mosaic mural of his paintings in the city’s public República de Panama Square.



While this amazing thing was happening, Rolo’s Intellectual Property right were being infringed in a shop in Buenos Aires. The owners of the place downloaded form Internet and printed Rolo’s paintings on t-shirts and handbags without any authorization or permission from the author.

Although he waited years (too long!) for protecting his Intellectual Property assets, Rolo came right on time to AROC, looking for advise on the matter just a couple of weeks before his friends in Argentina found out about the infringement that was done to his work. The due actions were taken and Rolo obtained the Intellectual Property tools he needed to face this situation: Copyright and Trademarks. Having his trademarks and copyrights registered, we were able to help Rolo in contacting officially the infractors through a formal Letter with the support of our colleagues in Argentina.

While the matter is still on discussion, the advise of Intellectual Property professionals gives Rolo a strong approach. Legal measures such as trials on the infraction are a possibility in order to get a compensation for the damages, but there also are more friendly and commercially successful solutions to it.

For instance, while it started from an ILLEGAL action taken by the owners of the store, through the tools of Intellectual Property it is possible to achieve a commercial agreement where the store compensates the artist by destroying the fake goods and putting on sale his original merchandise, giving in to him all the profit from its sales for a specific period of time, after which the relationship may continue and the store become a sales-point of Rolo in Argentina.

Having the correct Intellectual Property advise, protection and Intellectual Property based agreements; Rolo is prepared for developing all his future artistic and commercial projects safely.


Author of the article: Kat Yurchenko