Valeria Velez (Stephanie Sigman), left, and Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura), right, in the Netflix series "Narcos." Credit: Daniel Daza/Netflix

A Miami judge dropped a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a Colombian media personality claiming Netflix's "Narcos" series improperly borrowed details from her memoir about her affair and other dealings with Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar.

U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith granted summary judgment for the defendants, concluding similarities in two scenes cited by Virginia Vallejo were nonprotectable facts, expression and themes.

"Themes of power and manipulation would be expected in any work about a ruthless criminal who rises to become one of the richest men in the world, as would themes of men who are both good and evil, which can be found throughout literature," Smith wrote Friday.

Louis P. Petrich of Ballard Spahr in Los Angeles and Holland & Knight attorneys Scott Ponce and Rebecca J. Cañamero, who represented the defendants, had no comment on the order.

Vallejo's attorney, Robert Thornburg of Allen Dyer Doppelt + Gilchrist, plans an appeal, saying the judge didn't draw a proper distinction between nonprotectable historical fact and protectable nonhistorical fact.

"Both sides fully anticipated that this would ultimately be decided by the Eleventh Circuit," he said.

Smith's analysis focused on the portrayals of a sex scene between Escobar and fictional TV journalist Valeria Velez and a real-life meeting of Escobar, Colombian M-19 guerrilla leader Ivan Marina Ospina and Vallejo in her book "Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar."

Escobar gave his first television interview to Vellejo in 1983.

In the sex scene, Escobar caressed a blindfolded television reporter's neck and chest with a revolver. For the meeting, Vallejo's chapter title "That Palace in Flames" becomes "The Palace in Flames" in the series. But a different woman appears in the "Narcos" scene where Escobar plots to have evidence against him disappear during a guerrilla raid on the Colombian Palace of Justice in 1985.

Vallejo maintained "the 'average lay observer' would recognize the two scenes as having been copied from her copyright protected work," the judge said in a summary of her position. "Comparing the two scenes leads to the conclusion that they are not substantially similar. The atmosphere, or overall feel, of each of the scenes is very different."

The defendants were Netflix, series producer Narcos Productions LLC and distributor Gaumont Television USA LLC. The disputed episodes appeared in the first season of the three-season series.

Smith, who joined the bench in June, inherited the copyright case from U.S. District Chief Judge K. Michael Moore, who rejected a defense dismissal motion in May.

The U.S. government flew Vallejo out of Colombia in 2006 to testify in several high-profile cases involving figures connected to cocaine cartels. She received political asylum in the United States in 2010.

Penelope Cruz played Vallejo in the 2017 movie "Loving Pablo" based on her book opposite Javier Bardem as Escobar.

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