An Air Force Sergeant Faces Portugal's First Trial for Pirating Newspapers on Telegram, and Expresso's Owner Wants 631,500 Euros

For the first time, a case of illegal newspaper sharing is heading to trial in Portugal. Two men who set up social media groups to pass round paid-for newspapers and magazines have been indicted. One is a sergeant in the Força Aérea (Air Force). Impresa, the media group that owns the weekly Expresso, is asking them for 631,500 euros in damages.

The case was reported on Sunday by Público and followed up by Observador. It began almost six years ago with a criminal complaint from Impresa. The Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor's Office) has since identified the two men it says founded the groups.

A Telegram group of 10,000

The groups were large. The main one ran on Telegram under the name "Visapress" and had about 10,000 members, according to the indictment as reported by Observador. Impresa's damages claim is built on that number. It multiplies the group's 10,000 members by 63.16 euros, the average annual revenue the group says it earns from each subscriber.

The older defendant is 42. He studied computing at the University of Minho and now lives in Switzerland with his wife and two children. Prosecutors say he shared newspapers online for nine years. He bought subscriptions to several publications, paid for them with money from some group members, and, when questioned by Swiss authorities at Portugal's request, admitted that he bought them in order to pirate them.

The second defendant is the Air Force sergeant, aged 37. Prosecutors say he was a member of the Visapress group, and also set up an Instagram page called "jornaisportugueses" and a YouTube channel to share news content. Both men admitted to the authorities that they had founded groups for this purpose, Público reports.

The trial had been due to open in October. That now looks unlikely, because the man living in Switzerland has not yet been formally notified so that he can contest the indictment.

What the law says

The charges are usurpação (usurpation, meaning use of a protected work without the rightholder's permission) and aproveitamento de obra usurpada (exploiting a usurped work). Both are crimes under the Código do Direito de Autor e dos Direitos Conexos (Code of Copyright and Related Rights). Article 195 now names press publishers among the rightholders whose permission is needed. Under Article 197, each offence carries up to three years in prison and a fine of 150 to 250 days, both doubled for a repeat offence. Article 200 makes these public crimes, so prosecutors do not need the victim's complaint to pursue them, except where only moral rights are at stake.

Impresa found out how the PDF edition of Expresso was leaking in July 2020 and changed the way subscribers receive it to make sharing harder.

Years of blocked channels, but no trials

Publishers have spent years fighting this kind of sharing. In 2021, the Tribunal da Propriedade Intelectual (Intellectual Property Court) ordered 17 Telegram channels blocked for copyright infringement, and the following year Telegram itself closed 11 more. Administrators of these groups often charge members a monthly fee, sometimes as much as 10 euros, for access to dozens of titles.

No one has stood trial for it until now. Público notes that even members of parliament have been caught up in news piracy, and that in one earlier case a suspect paid to avoid going to trial.

For readers, the case is a reminder that a shared PDF of a Portuguese paper in a messaging group is not a grey area. Passing on a paid edition to a group is distribution of a protected work, and the law treats it as a crime.