G.R. No. 11937 - Laktaw vs. Paglinawan

The plaintiff, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, is the registered owner and author of a literary work entitled Diccionario Hispano-Tagalog (Spanish-Tagalog Dictionary), published in 1889 in the City of Manila by the printing establishment La Opinion.
The work was presented as Exhibit A in the complaint filed on February 20, 1915, in the Court of First Instance of the City of Manila.

The defendant, Mamerto Paglinawan, published a work titled Diccionariong Kastila-Tagalog (Spanish-Tagalog Dictionary) in 1913, which allegedly reproduced the plaintiff’s dictionary without his consent.
The plaintiff asserted that the defendant improperly copied the greater part of his dictionary, including definitions, examples, and even the printer’s errors, thereby infringing on his intellectual property rights.
It was contended that such copying, whether by literal reproduction of words or of the Tagalog equivalents and definitions, violated article 7 of the Law of January 10, 1879, on Intellectual Property, which prohibits reproduction without the owner’s consent.

The trial court, after hearing the evidence and arguments from both parties, rendered judgment on August 20, 1915, absolving the defendant of the complaint without a definitive ruling on the issue of costs.
The plaintiff moved for a new trial on the ground that the judgment was against the law and the weight of the evidence; this motion was overruled by the trial court.
Consequently, the plaintiff excepted to the order overruling his motion and appealed the case to the Supreme Court by means of a bill of exceptions.

Detailed comparisons were made between Exhibit A (plaintiff’s dictionary) and Exhibit B (defendant’s dictionary) along with the defendant’s memorandum listing words present in one dictionary but not in the other.
An in-depth analysis showed that:

For each letter of the alphabet, specific counts were presented, demonstrating that out of 23,560 Spanish words in the defendant’s dictionary, only 3,108 were original or added by him.
The remaining 20,452 words were determined to have been reproduced from the plaintiff’s work.

The examination further revealed that the defendant also copied the plaintiff’s Tagalog equivalents, definitions, and the formatting details (such as the grouping of words and the summary of Spanish words), including even certain printing errors.

The plaintiff based his claim on article 7 of the Law of January 10, 1879, which explicitly states that no one may reproduce another’s work without the owner’s consent—even for mere annotation, improvement, or addition.
Evidence of the plaintiff’s proprietary rights was indicated by the reservation notice “Es propiedad del autor” on the title page of his dictionary, in connection with the permission the Governor-General granted him on November 24, 1889.
Despite the loss of the certificate of registration (issued in 1890 and later lost during the revolution), the details on the copy of the dictionary and the historical application of the law were held as sufficient proof of his property right.
The validity of invoking the law was underscored by the Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898), which ensured that rights to literary properties acquired under Spanish sovereignty were to be respected even after the transition to United States sovereignty.

The primary issue was whether the defendant’s reproduction of the plaintiff’s dictionary amounted to an infringement of the plaintiff’s intellectual property rights.
It was questioned if such a reproduction—simply by copying words, definitions, and examples—violated article 7 of the Law of January 10, 1879, on Intellectual Property.

Whether the defendant’s act of using parts of the plaintiff’s work, even with some modifications (such as altered examples or the addition of new words), constituted a violation of the said law.
The issue also raised whether the ruling should be affected by the fact that the law had ceased operation following the substitution of Spanish sovereignty by that of the United States, despite treaty stipulations ensuring the protection of literary properties.

The accuracy and completeness in the trial court’s random selection of words for comparison between the dictionaries was also in question.
The matter centers on whether the partial comparison provided a solid basis for absolving the defendant, or if a full and detailed analysis (as later presented) clearly demonstrated a substantial copying of the plaintiff’s work.