November 2, 2026 · Indumor
Copying a machine is not illegal. Copying the four or five things the law protects is, and there are far fewer of them than most people assume.
We get the question all the time, when someone brings an imported machine to the shop and wants a second one just like it. The answer is the same in Argentina as in nearly every country: what is not protected can be built, and what is protected has a registration, a number and an expiry date. This guide walks that map in three parts, the problem, what happens when it is ignored, and how to settle it before the first plate is cut. It is general information, not legal advice.
In the eyes of the law a machine is several different things. The technical idea that makes it work may be patented. Its outside shape may be registered as an industrial design. The name and logo on the nameplate are a trademark. The drawings the manufacturer keeps locked away are confidential information. And the PLC program is software. Each layer has its own law and its own term, and a real machine can have one layer protected and the other four free.
The most common mistake is looking at a single layer. Someone searches the machine's name online, finds no mention of a patent and assumes anything goes, nameplate included. Someone else will not copy a machine from 1998 that is already in the public domain because he was told it "has a patent", and keeps paying for spare parts at gold prices.
When what you copy is protected, the trouble does not arrive on the day the machine starts up but months later, as a formal legal notice. Argentina's patent law, Law 24,481, lets the owner ask for injunctions, stopping fabrication and sales while the case runs, and claim damages. Trademarks are worse: Law 22,362 punishes anyone who counterfeits or fraudulently imitates a registered mark with three months to two years in prison. Stamping the original brand on the copy, or leaving the manufacturer's nameplate on it, turns a shop job into a criminal case.
There is a quieter consequence too. If the drawings you used came from a former employee of the manufacturer, or from a manual handed over under a confidentiality clause, Law 24,766 treats that information as acquired in a manner contrary to honest commercial practices. The machine can be perfect and the problem is still there.
Law 24,481 governs them and INPI, Argentina's industrial property office, grants them. A patent lasts twenty years from the filing date, with no extension. A utility model, which covers minor improvements in the shape or arrangement of tools and machines, lasts ten years, also without extension. Once the term runs out the invention belongs to everyone: a patent filed on March 12, 2004 stopped protecting its owner on March 12, 2024, even if the company still builds the machine.
Patents are territorial. A machine patented in Germany or China is protected in Argentina only if the manufacturer also filed here, and many do not. The reverse holds as well. A copy that is legal in Córdoba can infringe if you export it to a country where the patent is still in force. To find out, you search INPI's database, Espacenet, the European Patent Office's search tool, and Google Patents, by manufacturer and by function. One detail that confuses people: buying a patented machine gives you the right to use it, resell it or import it, because a patent has no effect against someone who acquires a product lawfully placed on the market. It does not give you the right to build another one.
They protect shape and appearance, not function. Decree-Law 6673/63 covers them: five years from filing, renewable for two equal periods, fifteen in all. If the manufacturer registered the design of the housing, you can build a machine that works the same way and looks different.
Law 22,362 protects the name, the logo and any distinctive sign, for ten years, renewable without limit as long as the mark is in use. You do not copy the name or the nameplate, and you do not sell the copy as if it were the original: it carries the plate of the shop that built it.
Law 24,766 protects information that is secret, has value because it is secret and is kept under reasonable safeguards. It also lists what counts as dishonest: breaching contracts, abusing trust, inducing someone else to breach, and acquiring information while knowing it came out through one of those routes. Taking apart and measuring a machine you bought, or surveying a colleague's machine with his permission, is not on that list. Using drawings from a former employee who signed a confidentiality agreement is. That is why the origin of every piece of survey data matters, and why it is worth writing it down.
Since a 1998 amendment, Argentina's intellectual property law, Law 11,723, protects computer programs in both source and object code. The PLC program in the original machine is the work of whoever wrote it. The logic, on the other hand, can be rebuilt: a programmer watches what the machine does, in what order and with which interlocks, and writes his own program. It is more work than copying the file.
It is in no statute and it is the one most often forgotten. Many purchase contracts and manuals carry a clause that forbids disassembling, copying or reverse engineering the equipment. If you signed it, Law 24,766 itself turns that copy into a breach of contract. Read the contract before you measure the machine.
The argument has a history. In 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court said, in Kewanee Oil v. Bicron, that trade secret protection does not reach discovery by fair and honest means, and named three: independent invention, accidental disclosure and so-called reverse engineering, starting with the known product and working backward. In 1989, in Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft, it struck down a Florida statute that banned copying boat hulls by direct molding, because the patent system depends on unpatented ideas circulating freely. Those are rulings from another country, but they set the rule most of the world followed, and which in Argentina you read in the laws above: what is not protected gets copied.
One closing piece of advice. Almost every machine that reaches a shop to be copied is twenty or thirty year old mechanical equipment, with no valid patent anywhere, and the only real obstacle is the patience to survey it properly. Give the patent search an afternoon before you give the shop three months, and file the result together with the drawings: a few years from now, when someone asks where the machine came from, that folder will be worth more than the machine. At Indumor we ask for it before we start.
Survey, drawings and fabrication of the copy in Córdoba, Argentina.
View service →The whole process, from teardown to test run.
Read guide →Before quoting the fabrication we check with you what is protected and what is not.
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