FACTS:
The plaintiffs' lot (dominant) as well as
defendant's lot (servient) are covered by Original Certificates of Title.
Certified copies of these certificates of title are found as Annexes
"A" and "B", pages 77 to 80 inclusive of the Record on
Appeal. In both of them, it does not appear any annotation in respect to the
easement supposedly acquired by prescription which, counting the twenty (20)
years from 1913 or 1914, would have already ripened by 1937, date of the
decrees of registration. Consequently, even conceding arguendo that such an
easement has been acquired, it had been cut off or extinguished by the
registration of the servient estate under the Torrens System without the
easement being annotated on the corresponding certificate of title, pursuant to
Section 39 of the Land Registration Act.
ISSUE:
Whether or not the respondents had acquired by
prescription an enforceable easement of light and view arising from a verbal
prohibition to obstruct such view and light, alleged to have been made upon
petitioner's predecessor-in-interest as owner of the adjoining lot, both of
which lots being covered by Torrens titles.
DECISION:
Respondents had not acquired an enforceable
easement of light and view by prescription. The windows in question are
admittedly in respondents' own building erected on their own lot. The easement,
if there is any, is therefore a negative one. It being a negative easement,
prescription shall commence to run "from the day on which the owner of the
dominant estate has, by a formal act, forbidden the owner of the servient
estate to perform any act which would be lawful without the easement."
Since no formal act has been done and such easement not having been annotated
on the land title, no easement of light and view has been acquired by prescription.
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