Daily Serving of Legal Matters

What is involved in the crime of theft? As provided in the Revised Penal Code, it is only personal property that is involved in the crime of theft.  Otherwise, the crime would not be theft. Personal Property refers to the property that is basically movable.  Meaning this is the property that can be carried with ease by the owner.  For instance, cellphone, appliances, money, and the likes. However, with the internet age we are in today, what is commonly stolen is the identity of a person.  Identity thieves are swarming in the cyberspace with the purpose to deceive somebody inorder to exact some money or to bash some persons inorder to conceal the real identity of the culprit. A lot of victims have already asked whether they could file this so-called identity theft case.  However, considering that we did not have yet, at that moment, any specific law defining and punishing such crime, the victims would just get frustrated. Fortunately, with t...

"Be responsible.   Anything malicious post/s you have on your wall in FACEBOOK, TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, GOOGLE and the likes might implicate you in the crime of LIBEL." With the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the Philippines upholding the constitutionality of the provision on online libel, it is expected that sooner or later, our courts would be flooded with the filing of cases of what has been posted on facebook, twitter and the likes. If the libel is committed online, the penalty shall be increased by one degree based on what has been provided by the Revised Penal Code (Sec. 6 of Republic Act Number 10175 or otherwise known as Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012). The fact that the provision on online libel was only inserted before it was signed into law is already beside the point. That provision is already declared constitutional and would remain so unless declared otherwise by the same Supreme Court of the Philippines in the coming days or years. Wha...

With the the declaration of the Supreme Court of the Philippines that several provisions of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 including penalizing internet libel are constitutional, a lot of the netizens were unhappy and worried about their freedom on speech online. Precisely the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 was declared constitutional on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, thereby ending the debates on the constitutionality of the said law.  There are some provisions of the law that were declared unconstitutional.