CAPPER v. SILVA.

 P. C, Colombo, 88,442.

Piracy of telegrams-Ordinance No. 19 of 1898, ss. 1 and 3-Failure to comply with provisions of Ordinance as to manner of publication.

Under section 1 of Ordinance No. 19 of 1898, when any person has, in the manner mentioned in the Ordinance, published in a newspaper, published and circulated in Ceylon, any message by electric telegraph from any place outside the Island, lawfully received by such person, no other person shall, without the consent in writing of such first-mentioned person, print or publish such telegram, or the substance thereof, or any extract therefrom, until after a period of forty-eight hours from the time of first publication.

Held, that where A and B receive the same message by electric telegraph, B cannot, by non-compliance with the requirements of the Ordinance as to the manner of publication, or by giving his consent to the publication of the message by a third party, deprive A of the right of maintaining a prosecution against such third party, provided A had in publishing the message complied with the requirements of the Ordinance as to the manner of publication, and had not consented to the publication of the message by such third party, and such third party had published the message within forty-eight hours of its publication by A.

IN this case the complainant, the editor of the Times of Ceylon, prosecuted the accused, the editor of the Sinhalese newspaper called the Sihala Samaya, for breach of section 1 of Ordinance No. 19 of 1898. The telegram which the complainant complained of as having been pirated by the accused had also been

published in the Ceylon Standard newspaper before it appeared in the accused's paper, but the editor of the Ceylon Standard had failed to comply with the requirements of the Ordinance as to the manner of publication of telegrams necessary to ensure their protection under the Ordinance. The accused was convicted by the Police Magistrate.

The accused appealed.

The case was argued on 26th September, 1904.

Walter Pereira, K.C. (Batuwantudawe with him), for appellant.-Under section 1 of the Ordinance protection can be claimed in respect of such telegrams only as have been published in the manner thereinafter mentioned, that is, in the manner required by section 3. That section provides that telegraphic messages under. the protection of the Ordinance should be printed under the heading " By Submarine Telegraph," and should state the day and hour of their receipt. Now, the Ceylon Standard had published the message without compliance with these requirements, and as under section 1 publication of a telegram is an offence only when it has already been published in compliance with the requirements of section 3, it was clearly no offence to copy this telegram from the Standard, and the defence is that the accused copied from that paper. The mere fact that the Times also published the same news with compliance of the requirements of section 3 makes no difference. Whatever the practice may be, the two papers must be assumed to have received a telegram each containing the same news, and it was competent to one of the two papers, either by consenting to the re-publication of the telegram received by it or-what amounts to the same thing-by publishing it without compliance of the requirements of section 3, to render re-publication of the telegram by another person no offence under the Ordinance, although the other paper has published the news with compliance of those requirements. The remedy is a change of the system, or the conditions under which telegrams are distributed by the same agent or two or more newspapers, rather than a prosecution of this sort.

Dornhorst, K.C, for respondent.-The non-observance of the requirements of the Ordinance by the Standard could not affect the rights of the Times. The same telegram was received by the two papers. The Times published it