At the end of 2022, Chilean entrepreneur David Herrera was celebrating the New Year. While drinking a piscola — one of Chile’s most popular drinks — he came up with the idea of creating a pisco brand called Pedro Piscal. Almost immediately, he began to do the paperwork and registered the name at the Institute of Intellectual Property (INAPI). The registration was published in the Official Gazette in June 2023. In 2024, Herrera began to market the product.

Pedro Piscal was launched last year as a premium, 40° product at $12 a bottle. That same year, Chilean actor José Pedro Balmaceda Pascal, star of series such as Narcos and Game of Thrones, filed a lawsuit to have the brand name annulled. His main beef was that Pedro Piscal is a brand name “indisputably inductive to error or confusion,” with consumers being led to believe the actor is behind the product.

The actor’s law firm, Estudio Silva, has pointed out that the Pedro Piscal brand name “is almost identical in graphic and phonetic terms” to his name. The lawsuit adds that it is in “clear contravention of the general principle of good faith, and of the rules on fair competition and commercial ethics as there is a clear interest in commercial exploitation on the part of the defendant to take advantage of the fame of our client by obtaining a trademark registration that evidently seeks to be related to Pedro Pascal for profit, and on the basis of distracting consumers toward an erroneous commercial origin.”

According to Herrera’s lawyer, from the Estudio Ármate firm, the brand name was based on “Pedro for Pedro Jiménez, the grape variety used to make pisco, and Piscal because it is directly related to pisco. It is a play on words but with no reference to the actor.” He also pointed out that the image used on the bottle and website is that of a man next to a dog and not one of the actor. This, Herrera’s camp say, is proof that “the trademark was requested in good faith, that it is being used legitimately and that, therefore, no consumer is confused.”

Pascal’s lawyer, meanwhile, has argued that Herrera “cannot allege that he was unaware of the similarity between the brand name he registered and the name of our client. It is not a simple coincidence, especially considering the strong presence that our client has in the area in which the defendant offers its products and services.” This was in reference to the actor being the face of Corona beer and the Chilean wine Casillero del Diablo, owned by Viña Concha y Toro. The actor’s lawyer told EL PAÍS that Pedro Piscal is a trademark that “can be harmful” to Pedro Pascal’s image.

Herrera’s lawyers are now asking for the LA-based actor to present his evidence against them via Zoom. “As a defense, we requested that the plaintiff himself absolve positions, because we believe it is essential that he be directly responsible for the statements presented in the lawsuit against our client. This precedent is relevant to reinforce the fact that in Chile the rules of free competition and trademark protection are applied without distinction of the identity of the parties,” Herrera’s lawyer stated. The case could take up to two years to resolve but may get as far as the Supreme Court.

The law firm representing Herrera has won similar lawsuits brought against its clients in the past: that of the Superpan bakery taken to court by DC Comics over the character Superman; and the Chilean firm Agrosuper, for the word super. It was also involved in the StarWash case, a car wash firm that managed to maintain its brand name after being challenged by Lucasfilm. Then there was the brand Harry Plotter, a printing and advertising company that was sued by Warner Bros over the similarity with Harry Potter. Another case was that of the Chilean comedian Christian Henríquez, who wrangled with Michael Jackson’s representatives over the name of his character Maikel Pérez Jackson, which he finally managed to register.