From the police report:

Local Police have been called to assist distressed motorists who have become stranded within the Murray-Sunset National Park after following directions on their Apple i-phone.

Tests on the mapping system by police confirm the mapping systems lists Mildura in the middle of the Murray Sunset National Park, approximately 70km away from the actual location of Mildura.

Police are extremely concerned as there is no water supply within the Park and temperatures can reach as high as 46 degrees, making this a potentially life threatening issue.

Some of the motorists located by police have been stranded for up to 24 hours without food or water and have walked long distances through dangerous terrain to get phone reception.

Bad directions and misidentified locations are usually just inconvenient or annoying; they do not usually lead to life-threatening scenarios. But in certain cases like this one, they can be, which is why Apple needs to get a fix in place as soon as possible. Apple is reportedly working to improve the bad imagery, misidentified locations and off-target directions. But this is not exactly great PR for the company and its brand new Maps product.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has admitted that Apple “screwed up” with its initial release of Maps in September, as he said last week in an interview with Bloomberg. Besides removing some former overseers of the project and assigning a new leader, Cook said, “We’re putting all of our energy into making it right. And we have already had several software updates. We’ve got a huge plan to make it even better.”

The sooner the details of this “huge plan” are revealed and implemented, the better.

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Proposed in August and coming up for first reading in the Bundestag this Thursday, the Leistungsschutzrecht – or, ancillary copyright — would give news publishers the exclusive right to control re-uses of their output, requiring others obtain a license even to excerpt.

Google fought back on Tuesday by using a google.de homepage campaign to ask users to complain to elected representatives, casting the issue as one both of fundamental freedoms and of practicality: “For you, it would be so much more difficult on the internet to find the information that you seek. Defend your network.”

It is a mark of how seriously Google is taking the threat that it is trying to appeal to users’ emotions, enlisting them to fight the proposals. Google argues Leistungsschutzrecht will “damage the German economy” and “threaten the diversity of information”.

German publishers have formed their own counter-campaign…

Google is widely thought to be allowed to crawl news stories of which it republishes only excerpts. Emerging law may suggest otherwise — a Belgian court ruled in 2007 that it did not have the right to run such excerpts and UK copyright authorities this year ruled commercial news aggregators (though not free alternatives like Google News) must pay a license for doing so.

In Belgium, news stories were only returned to Google after a private commercial agreement between it and publishers. So German publishers may feel confident in seeking an equivalent arrangement. And that would challenge the widely-held belief in free online excerpting.

But Germany is not the only front on which Google is facing a threat to these core values on which it operates…

This week an Australian court ruled Google had defamed a man wrongly accused of being a criminal in a web page not hosted by but indexed by Google for its search results.

That contradicts the settled view of many legal jurisdictions that online platforms are not to be considered publishers of information placed by others, though is consistent with other case law that holds such platforms liable from the moment they are made aware of infringing material on their platform.

My colleague, paidContent legal correspondent Jeff Roberts, says this may make it more likely would-be litigants shop for victories in forums like Australia.

France also recently set Google a year’s-end deadline for agreeing to voluntarily pay news publishers — or  it may legislate that it must pay a levy for the privilege. Google told French ministers such a compulsion would “threaten its very existence”.

So now Google is battling challenge to two of its central tenets — that it is not a publisher and only excerpts parts of articles.

Asked why its members don’t just block Google using robots.txt, the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers on Tuesday said via Twitter: “Robots.txt is a standard from the internet stone age. Why doesn’t Google want to use (alternative standard) ASCAP ACAP, that is the question.”

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Apple’s Australia division made nearly $5 billion in revenues for that year. But $28.5 million amounts to about .003 percent of the $8.2 billion in profits the company earned in the last quarter alone — pocket change for Apple.

The tax bill is notable because of how profitable Apple is and how at the same time it has managed to out-maneuver many tax laws in the U.S. and Europe by building a complex web of subsidiaries in lower-tax countries like Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the British Virgin Islands.

The New York Times explained these schemes in an in-depth piece earlier this year. Many companies do stuff like this, but Apple is a prime example of how these schemes can benefit companies based in the U.S. who do more than half of their business outside the country.

Some of Apple’s peers have also been in the headlines recently for their own alleged tax avoidance. This week both Amazon and Google were made to answer for their own tax bills before a government accounting committee in the U.K.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user artist in doing nothing

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To identify what people might want to watch on its smh.tv video site, the Sydney Morning Herald publisher says it searches the P2P protocol for popular videos, Fairfax’s TV head Ricky Sutton tells The Australian:

“One of our major ways to get content is going to BitTorrent, and other BitTorrent sites, and find what people are illegally downloading to then go to the content owner and say, ‘hey, I watched this last night it’s going awesome on BitTorrent’ and then say ‘how about giving it to us?”‘

“We then bring it over here and we advertise on BitTorrent that it’s legally available on our platform, and then pay some revenue share based on it. That’s worked quite effectively.”

What Sutton mean is, smh.tv wants to license quality documentaries that are currently going unmonetized through BitTorrent, helping their producers earn something in the process.

The tactic is likely cheaper for Fairfax than commissioning shows in the traditional way the TV industry does it.

Two years ago, shortly after smh.tv was launched, Sutton told a conference licensing costs were so high that the service would be paying out $16 million per month soon. The new tactic is a cheaper option.

Using file-sharing networks to identify consumer appetite is smart but not entirely new in other media sectors. Music labels are believed to pay close to attention to what goes down well with freeloaders.

The Australian‘s diary writer jests: “One wonders what advertisers think of Fairfax tailoring content to the tastes of people who don’t want pay for anything.”

Fairfax’s smh.tv also licenses videos more formally from sources like CNN International. The site is also carried on Fairfax newspaper sites like The Age‘s.

Amongst the current-affairs and factual documentaries on smh.tv, the current most popular video is Beer: An Insider’s Guide, an Australian series nearly a decade old.

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The promising social TV app startup Zeebox, which is due for U.S. launch this summer, will next head to Australia.

The London outfit, which paidContent revealed last summer, has struck a deal with commercial broadcaster Network Ten, which has made a “substantial” investment to form Zeebox Australia as a joint venture. It is helmed as CEO by Craig Blair, formerly an investor with Netus, an investment arm of News Corp’s News Ltd.

The deal mimics the one in which BSkyB invested millions in to Zeebox‘s UK operation to secure the company for development of its own social TV apps and in which it gifted TV advertising airtime to the startup.

In Australia, Network Ten will also commit promotion and, like Sky, wants to re-use Zeebox technology in its own-brand second-screen proposition.

Zeebox is now reaching out to broadcasters, TV producers and second-screen technology builders, encouraging them to build in-app experiences – through its “OpenBox” HTML platform – to sit in Zeebox, which works on iPad, iPhone, Android and web.

Zeebox offers several things – live chat and social feeds for shows, live info tags and purchase options for on-screen activity and custom experiences during particular shows.

It eschews the “check-in” philosophy of GetGlue and Miso but will go up against Yahoo’s Intonow when it launches State-side.

Zeebox, which is the banner sponsor for BSkyB’s The Simpsons, claims a million UK downloads to date, but did not disclose how many users are active. Usage in my social graph is notably low.

The outfit has gained respect for being started by former BBC iPlayer technology executive Anthony Rose, along with CEO Ernesto Schmitt.

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The company is teaming up with New York-based Everyday Health, one of the leading health advice networks in America, to launch local versions of its sites in the U.K. and Australia.

The first site, a British version of the pregnancy and parenting site WhatToExpect, is set to launch towards the end of 2012, with others to follow. It appears to largely be an advertising play, with RollUp in charge of managing the site launches, sales and marketing — but the two companies say there will also be scope for content development specific to each market.

“We are honored and excited to be working with Everyday Health, Inc. to achieve its international expansion goals by bringing two powerhouse U.S.-based brands to new audiences and advertisers in Europe and Asia Pacific,” said Ben Regensburger, CEO of RollUpMedia. “These sites will undoubtedly fill a niche in the growing advertising landscape abroad.”

Although growth in the U.K. and Australian online ad markets is not quite as strong as in the United States, they are still significant: British online display was valued at more than £1 billion ($1.55 billion) in 2011, for example.

It’s the latest part of Everyday Health’s expansion, which included moves into video at the end of last year with the appointment of former ABC News Digital chief Paul Slavin and an ABC TV series.

The company, which started out as Waterfront Media and merged with Steve Case’s Revolution Health Network in 2008, has. After raising more than $150 million in investment over the past decade, the company cancelled a planned IPO in 2010. International expansion could be one way to get those plans back on track.

That seems to fit smartly with RollUp’s platform, which is aimed precisely at allowing publishers in specific verticals to outsource the building of their digital businesses, as the company’s UK boss told Robert recently:

“We noticed digital publishers, especially in Europe, were struggling to build digital businesses,” UK MD Rags Gupta, formerly Brightcove VP, tells paidContent.
“Niche sites may have websites, blogs and a Twitter presence but they don’t know much about SEO and monetisation.
“We have built a platform that covers all aspects of content: creation, distribution and monetisation.”

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Adding up to 1,900 job losses and up to A$235 million ($237 million) a year in cost cuts by June 2015, the template will be familiar to anyone who has observed other news publishers’ increasingly desperate contortions in other countries:

• Metered digital payments for SMH and The Age from Q1 2013 across all platforms (prices announced at end of 2012).
• Two printing presses mothballed by June 2014. “Both sites were commissioned when almost all of Metro Media’s content was delivered through the printed newspaper.”
• “Digital-first” editorial integration of print, digital and mobile production.
• Smaller, “compact” format for broadsheet SMH and The Age.

But that’s not all. To strengthen its balance sheet, Fairfax is selling 15 percent of its 66 percent share in New Zealand classified ads and auctions site TradeMe to raise A$160 million.

CEO Greg Hywood (via announcement):

“No one should be in any doubt that we are operating in very challenging times. Readers’ behaviours have changed and will not change back.”

According to Fairfax data presented to investors, 77 percent of its audience is via digital; 65 percent of that is from web. “To date, access has been free,” the presentation says. “Whilst this has driven digital traffic it has impacted print circulation.”

TheAge.com.au and SMH.com.au (Australia’s top news website) currently have around five million monthly uniques combined; their app editions have clocked 570,000 downloads to date.

News Corporation’s Australian subsidiary, News Limited, began introducing promised digital fees recently, so Fairfax might console itself that it is not going alone.

In 2011, the Fairfax made 14 percent ($345,175,740) of its A$2,465,541,000 annual revenue from digital sources, its annual report stated. Much of that is from its pure-play digital classifieds options across Australia and New Zealand.

In its new strategy, Fairfax says it is retaining a “flexible” option to “transition to a digital only model” if print circulation and advertising decline further despite its changes – something no-one would rule out at this point.

But former The Age editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan writes this scathing critique of how mismanagement has allowed Fairfax to decline to this point:

• Fairfax rejected Jaspan’s plea, five years ago, to merge newsrooms’ print and online teams.
• “The decline and implosion of the media was seen as a European or American disease that Australia would avoid.”
• “The company has been run by senior executives and boards with no direct experience running a media company.”
• “One by one Fairfax was stripped of its classified advertising ‘rivers of gold’. The jobs went to Seek.com.au, Cars to Carsales.co.au, homes to Realestate.com.au.”
• “The share price has collapsed from $5 to 60c or less because no one in the market believes there is a coherent strategy for the company.”

And Jaspan fears a growing Fairfax equity grab by mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, the world’s richest woman, could leave its papers the mouthpiece of anti-climate change rhetoric.

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Reports first flooded in from Australia, where Apple’s been fighting a court case over its 4G claims, pointing out that the “iPad 4G” has been dubbed “iPad WiFi & Cellular”.

The same change has happened in some other countries, including New Zealand — but not everywhere, even when the device is not compatible with local networks.

In Sweden, France and Germany, for example, nothing has changed: the iPad is still labelled “WiFi + 4G”, and information that LTE is only supported by AT&T, Verizon, Bell, Rogers and Telus is relegated to a mere footnote. Meanwhile in the U.K., where the company is banned from using ’4G’ in its marketing because there is no 4G networking at all, the Apple website’s tech specs page still lists 4G capability — but with the same caveat brought up the page into the spec.

It paints a confusing picture, despite the fact that the reality is simple: outside North America, the new iPad’s higher speed connections won’t work.

The confusion is partly because different countries have had different issues with Apple’s marketing. Some have no 4G networks at all — and therefore have concerns that consumers are potentially being misled into buying a product for which there is not appropriate support. Others pointed out that the iPad’s higher speed frequencies — it operates at 700Mhz and 2100Mhz — are incompatible with their local 4G spectrum.

Why not simply change it full stop in the same way? Unless the changes are just being rolled out slowly, the company appears to have chosen a patchwork approach for reasons that are unclear. What’s happened where you live?

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Is Twitter a publisher and distributor of information like a newspaper, or is it just a dumb pipe like a telephone network? Lawyers in Australia seem to believe that a case could be made that Twitter is a publisher, like a newspaper, and therefore it can be sued for defamation as a result of a single tweet. That may be a stretch — especially in the United States, which has legislation that protects online commentary from such lawsuits — but it highlights the difficulties that Twitter could have as it tries to expand around the globe and into different legal environments.

As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, a tweet by writer and TV personality Marieke Hardy — in which she falsely accused a man of setting up a blog to attack her — led to a lawsuit by the aggrieved party for defamation, and Hardy wound up having to pay a settlement said to be in the $15,000 range. But the victim apparently wasn’t satisfied with this judgment, and is now suing Twitter because the offending message was retweeted by her followers, and also appeared on the Twitter home page.

Does Twitter edit content? That could be important

This might seem absurd at first. After all, isn’t Twitter just a network like the telephone system, which relays messages sent by users? Perhaps. But the real-time information network is unlike the phone system in many other ways, some of which could be very relevant to such a case. For example, the phone company doesn’t normally listen to conversations and delete or block the ones that it doesn’t like — but Twitter has explained that it routinely blocks users and also deletes tweets for all sorts of reasons, including illegal behavior of various kinds.

Doing this, some lawyers argue, makes the company a lot more like a newspaper publisher than a phone network or dumb pipe. According to media lawyer David Poulton:

There’s not a lot of difference conceptually between Twitter or other internet publishing and an airmail copy of a newspaper; it’s just quicker.

This argument is based on the idea that a publisher who makes choices about what to publish and what not to publish needs to be held to a higher standard of legal behavior than one who just transmits messages without editing them — that’s why phone companies don’t get sued when someone says something defamatory on the phone. But Twitter exerts much more control over its network and the content that flows over it, which is why the British government tried to make the case that it was to some extent liable for some of the violence during the London riots and argued that it should be blocked.

Providers in the U.S. are partially protected from such lawsuits

Such a case isn’t as likely to fly in the United States because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (also called the “Good Samaritan” provision), which — as my paidContent colleague Jeff Roberts has explained — states that a provider of “interactive computer services” is not liable for the content transmitted over that service. This is what protects bloggers and websites from defamation cases in the U.S., and also protects ISPs (to some extent) from having to monitor everything that happens on their networks, something SOPA threatened to change.

That said, however, someone could argue that Twitter isn’t just an electronic information service, but is much closer to being a publisher — in part because it is the only one who controls the data and content that appear on the service, rather than being part of a larger, open web ecosystem with many players.

In countries like Australia and Canada, meanwhile, there is very little U.S.-style protection for any website or service that hosts defamatory content, which leaves Twitter open to actions like the one that was recently filed in Sydney. And other nations have even more rigid and draconian laws around defamation and other crimes related to publishing — including Britain, where the courts routinely use “super-injunctions” not only to block newspapers and even social media from reporting on specific legal cases, but from reporting that any such case even exists.

The Australian case may be settled quickly and/or easily, but what about the next one? The reality is that most of the laws that are currently being enforced weren’t designed to deal with entities that are part publisher and part pipe — with content that is partway between text and speech. Welcome to the challenges of being global, Twitter.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee

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Today, a blog post on High Scalability highlighted 99designs’ architecture, calling it the sort of reliable cloud infrastructure medium-sized ecommerce companies can parlay into running big workloads.

Melbourne, Australia-based 99designs has 12 technical staffers (eight developers, two devops people and two user-experience or “ux” designers) and runs no servers of its own, preferring to use the Amazon Web Services cloud for the heavy lifting. That decision has worked out just fine, according to 99Designs’ dev op Lars Yencken. In a recent blog post, Yencken wrote:

Our site sees hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month, generating pageviews in the tens of millions. Since we deal with graphic design, many of our pages are asset heavy — these pageviews fan out to some 40 times as many requests. Whilst there are many larger sites on the net, we thought this was enough to warrant sharing the way we do things.

99designs uses Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to route work around servers evenly; the Varnish web application accelerator to speed up the jobs once they’re allocated; Amazon’s S3 and mySQL database service for main storage;  and Memcached, MongoDB and Redis services for transient data of different types.

Yencken wrote:

Memcached runs locally on every application server, with a peering arrangement between servers, and helps us reduce our database queries dramatically. We log errors and statistics to capped collections in MongoDB, providing us with more insight into our system’s performance. Redis captures per-user information about which features are enabled at any given time; it supports our development stragegy around dark launches, soft launches and incremental feature rollouts.

The company also uses RightScale to manage its servers in the Amazon cloud, a la Zynga. It also uses Rackspace’s Cloudfiles as extra backup for disaster recovery.

However, challenges remain. Yencken said the tendency is to stockpile servers for peak times, meaning the company is overprovisioning its computing resources against the very tenets of cloud computing. What it should be doing, he acknowledged, is better automating and stress-testing its infrastructure so it can bring up servers faster as needed. “This would allow us to confidently reduce capacity when we have excess, rather than simply expanding,” he wrote.

Whatever the company is doing, it seems to be working. According to its web site, 99designs has hosted 118,887 contests in four years and claims 143,224 designers in its community.

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