Reuters reported Thursday that Apple has asked for a review of the decision by the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI). That decision, announced Wednesday, was that since local Brazilian company Gradiente Electronica had filed the iPhone trademark in 2000 — seven years before Apple introduced the iPhone — and released a product with the name in December 2012, Apple did not have exclusive rights to use iPhone.

As part of the review, Gradiente will have to establish a few things, according to Reuters:

Now, in order to keep its trademark rights, Gradiente will need to prove to the regulator in the next 60 days that it made use of the trademark between January 2008 and January 2013, Inpi said late on Wednesday. Brands in Brazil must be developed within 5 years of gaining approval.

With the “iPhone” smartphone Gradiente began selling in December, it appears to have met those guidelines. But that’s most certainly not going to be the end of this story, since Apple can take the case to court.

This is beginning to look as though it could play out the same way an iPad trademark case did in China last year. Like Brazil, China has a “first-to-file” policy that tends to favor the first person to file a trademark, not necessarily the first user. A Chinese company, Proview, had registered the trademark for iPad before Apple made the device. Apple said it bought the rights to the iPad trademark from Proview in 2009, before the iPad was introduced, for $55,000. Facing bankruptcy in 2012, Proview’s parent company disputed the sale and tried to get the iPad excluded from sale in China. After months of legal battles, Apple ended up paying a sort of ransom of $60 million as a settlement.

Settlement with Apple might be the ultimate goal here for Gradiente too. Its CEO has said from the moment this became international news that he’s willing to talk and is “open to dialogue about anything” with Apple.

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Gradiente was granted the iPhone trademark in 2008. Apple began selling its iPhone in 2007. Though the company has a different name now (IGB Electronica SA) it began selling a device in the country it calls the iPhone in December 2012. (To add a little insult to injury, the device runs Android.)

Both companies can use the trademark, the Institute of Industrial Property ruled, but Gradiente has the option of suing for exclusive use of it since it registered the name first, according to the report. Apple, meanwhile, is still the only company that can legally sell software, clothing and publications with the iPhone trademark. So, there’s that.

The agency told the BBC that Apple is already planning to appeal. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the story.

The Brazilian company is said to be willing to make a deal with Apple. IGB Chairman Eugenio Emilio Staub told Bloomberg last week his company was “open to a dialogue for anything, anytime … We’re not radicals.”

This is perhaps a temporary setback for Apple, which has high hopes for the country as a market for iPhones and other products. Last year, CEO Tim Cook specifically mentioned Brazil as the most interesting emerging market — after China – for Apple.

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Brazilian location-services company Cargo Tracck is working with the Brazilian environmental protection authorities and carriers to stop deforestation in the Amazon through the tracking of individual trees. By embedding Gemalto machine-to-machine (M2M) radio modules into specially designed logging monitors, Cargo Tracck is able to detect if trees are being chopped down and moved.

It’s a unique approach to M2M because it requires monitoring devices in areas where cellular networks usually don’t reach — the depths of the rainforest. The genius of Cargo Tracck’s system though is that in an ideal situation the monitoring devices will never have to transmit.

If the protected trees remain undisturbed, the modules would just hang unmolested in the forest canopy. But if the tree were cut down and trucked to an illegal sawmill, the monitor would notify the authorities as soon as it got within range of a cellular network. Gemalto’s newest low-power M2M modules use radiation exchange data tracking technologies that can extend its range 20 miles, so they can transmit their coordinates even if illegal loggers are skirting cities and highways.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user .curt.

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The Indian sites will join Gawker’s new Spanish-language version of Gizmodo — which launched on Monday — as well as local versions of various Gawker sites that have launched in Brazil, Hungary and the United Kingdom. In some cases, as with India, the local sites are run by partners in that country, and consist of translated blog posts from the U.S. site as well as some local content created by those partners.

Gawker’s partner in Brazil — a media entity called F451 — runs native versions of four Gawker sites (Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel and Jalopnik) while the company’s partner in Japan runs just a local version of Gizmodo. And in Hungary, the Gawker presence consists of a site called Cink.hu, which isn’t really a copy of any of the blog network’s other sites and is run by Laszlo Szily, who worked for Denton when the Gawker founder was a Financial Times correspondent in Hungary.

Gizmodo’s new Spanish site and the Hungarian site are new variations on the model because they aren’t based on partnerships with local operators like the Times of India — they are both owned and operated by the U.S. company, using staff who write in the other language (although both will also run translated versions of Gawker content). Some of the staff at Gizmodo’s new Spanish version are based in New York and others in Spain, a result of Gawker’s recent acquisition of a local Gawker-style site called Guanabee, whose founder now runs Gizmodo en Espanol.

Gawker wants international to be 20 percent of revenue

I asked Denton whether the company is expanding internationally because growth in the U.S. market has slowed and he said no — according to the Gawker CEO, the blog network says it expects to see 40-per-cent growth in 2013, an even faster rate than it saw in 2012, although Denton didn’t say whether that was revenue or some other metric (Update: Denton clarified to me via Twitter that he meant revenues). He also said he wants to take international revenues to 20 percent of Gawker’s sales from the 5-per-cent level they are at currently, and that international deals are much more lucrative for Gawker because the profit margins are higher,.

As for what comes next, Denton said China is the biggest hole in Gawker Media’s portfolio of international properties. The company has been trying to set something up there but hasn’t been able to find the right local partner yet, he said, and therefore it may need to publish Chinese content from somewhere outside the country if it wants to make inroads into that market.

Denton also said that the company’s new Kinja platform has been a big part of the expansion, since it allows Gawker sites to host more active conversations and discussions than the previous version — including discussions that are sponsored by advertisers. Gawker launched the new platform last year, and Denton told me in an interview at the time that the focus on discussions awas going to be a big part of the future of Gawker.

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Google chairman Eric Schmidt met French president François Hollande on Monday at the Elysée, which, in a statement, says:

“(Hollande) stressed that dialogue and negotiation between partners seemed, to him, the best way – but, if necessary, a law could intervene on this issue, as with the current project in Germany. The development of the digital economy calls for an adaptation in taxation in order to better understand the value of sharing and funding the creation of content.”

A unified policy from Europe’s two big axes, France and Germany, against Google’s view — that it crawls news stories but publishes only excerpts – could be a big problem for Mountain View.

Eric Schmidt meets France’s president, culture minister and other ministers

In August, Germany’s Bundestag passed Leistungsschutzrecht, a copyright law amendment devised by the country’s coalition government that will give news publishers a year-long exclusive right to publish their material online, requiring others obtain a license to excerpt.

Such legislation is likely devised from a position defending troubled industries, rather than genuinely safeguarding Fair Use-style rights. But that doesn’t mean Google won’t have to deploy its policy arsenal in defense again all the same.

Google wrote to several French ministers earlier this month with a threat of its own — if the levy is implemented, “as a consequence, (we) would be required to no longer reference French sites.” Google warned that France’s proposal would “threaten its very existence” and harm the content market, AFP reported.

Eric Schmidt arrives at the Élysée

This all sounds familiar…

Google’s most notable European news worries came in Belgium, where in 2007 a court ruled that Google did not have the right to run story excerpts from members of the Copiepresse trade group. Google duly pulled the newspaper sites’ out of Google News — ironically, much to their chagrin. Later, they struck an agreement — undetailed — through which Google restored the content in mid-2011.

Now the issue looks like re-opening again…

• France: Hollande is in a good position to make headway, emboldened both by the European Commission’s competition scrutiny of Google’s indexing algorithm and by its French-led inquiry that has ordered Google to re-separate its recently united privacy policies.
• Germany: The extent to which Google is really encapsulated by Leistungsschutzrecht is not fully clear, but a test could be on the horizon.
• Brazil: 154 newspapers comprising 90 percent of the market are withholding their content from Google News, and say they have barely lost any traffic.

Not everyone takes the same stance. UK newspapers, supported by the country’s copyright court, also now require commercial aggregators pay a license for re-use, but their definition of “commercial” encompasses only paid clipping services, not free services like Google News. That means Google can limbo under the law by choosing not to commercialize its service.

That is not necessarily a productive situation. Together with its stock defense (“we drive four billion clicks to news publishers”), this “we don’t profit from your content” argument may be one which Google deploys in negotiation. But that won’t necessarily trump the equal refrain from many a worried publisher: “Neither do we!”

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But, although the service sees no problem heading to emerging young markets, high costs will keep it out of Germany for the foreseeable future.

“We’re about to launch in France, Spain and Italy,” international VP Nic Jones told Informa Telecom & Media’s Industry Outlook 2013 conference on Tuesday.

“The one missing country is Germany. Germany is very, very hard to gain digital rights to be able to build a digital business.”

License rates required of digital services by royalty collectors are still relatively high in the country.

“They (rightsholders) genuinely believe they are protecting the music industry,” Jones said. “They need to embrace the future without being so scared of it.”

Jointly owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media Company, Vevo has so far launched in six countries, including Brazil. Whilst that choice might raise some eyebrows, the territory is growing up fast.

Jones said Vevo aims to launch in countries where people are most passionate about live music: “Actually, there is a market to monetize premium videos in Brazil – and Mexico, too.”

Such expansion will see mobile become Vevo’s primary distribution device.

“UK growth is far greater than on mobile than anything else,” Jones said. “Asia s a bit down the track for us. But we don’t see Vevo as a desktop proposition

“We are talking with various potential partners in India, where Indians many will only ever see the internet as a mobile proposition.

“Eastern Europe is going to be a high priority for us next year- places like Russia are incredibly important.”

But, as mobile becomes the majority, free content operators are posed with a challenge – advertising models are playing catch-up.

“Monetising mobile is much more hard,” Vevo VP Jones told Informa Telecoms & Media’s conference.

“The formats aren’t clear yet. The idea from agencies that mobile should be treated separately is a mistake. There is a view that mobile should be sold at a lower CPM. Most advertisers buying VOD are thinking about the laptop or the PC.

“There is a very big job to educate the advertisers and agencies. Not to educate the users – they are naturally emanating toward mobile.”

The challenge of emerging markets being mobile-first is one recognised by others like Facebook, which conceded in its IPO filing that it is increasingly well used in developing countries on handsets, where its business model is virginal.

But what Jones was also speaking to was a growing grumble I am hearing, from content services, that – even in the west – mobile advertising effectiveness just isn’t yet cutting it.

Jones speculated that Vevo may float on the market “one day”. And he said, in future, it would innovate around presenting live music gigs. He cited an example of a Led Zepplin concert which attracted two million applications for 20,000 tickets as proving there is a ready audience of people to pay for online gig streams.

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The next country in which tension has erupted is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

All 154 members of the Association of Newspapers in Brazil (ANJ), comprising 90 percent of  the country’s newspaper circulation, recently opted out of Google News, claiming the search firm should pay them to re-run their headlines and excerpts.

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reports the issue provoked disagreement between a Google executive and a local newspaper lawyer at this week’s American Press Association General Assembly in Sao Paulo.

We have already seen this issue play out in Belgium, Germany and France, where national newspapers associations have reported Google to courts and to regulators for republishing their headlines.

But Brazil is a new ball game, with an increasingly affluent, increasingly digital middle class ready to grow the country from an “emerging market” in to a real market. If Google cannot get publishers on board, it may be missing out on some of the Latin America boom opportunity.

At the General Assembly, Google reeled out the same stock defence it has used in all related cases elsewhere – it sends four billion clicks to news sites each month (via Estadao).

But, with intransigence like that on display from the publishers there, chances aren’t good. “By providing the first few lines of our stories to internet users, (Google) reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites,” ANJ president Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto told Knight Center - the direct opposite logic to that which Google brandishes.

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• The New York Times says it will launch a Portuguese-language edition of its website in 2013, containing translations of its English articles and original local material – all in all, 30 to 40 articles per day.
• This comes two weeks after the Financial Times said it, too, will launch a Latin American edition in print as well as web and mobile app.

Each of the titles already has several national editions around the world. The FT has operated FTChinese.com since 2005, whilst NYT launched cn.nytimes.com in beta this June, due to launch fully in November.

Mashable: “Unlike the U.S. edition, which introduced a metered paywall plan in March 2011, readers of the Chinese and Portuguese editions do not need a digital subscription for full web access, a Times spokesperson told Mashable.”

Often, when analogue companies go global it is with digital products – for example, Netflix and Lovefilm are taking streaming but not DVDs to new territories. But emerging markets are still experiencing analogue growth.

Newspaper circulation grew 3.3 percent last year in Latin America, at a time when it shrunk by 4.3 percent in the United States and 3.4 percent in Europe, according to the World Association of Newspapers.

In the next few years, Brazil will host the Summer Olympics and soccer World Cup.

So the Financial Times is opening a new “digital newspaper print site” in São Paulo, Brazil – something CEO John Ridding said “underscores our belief in a healthy future for print”.

What we are about to see, in the FT‘s case, is a patchwork strategy of low-cost print-and-digital launches in emerging markets alongside eventual tactical retreat of print in large western cities, as the publisher approaches a print-to-digital tipping point there.

In NYT‘s case, it is telling that, whilst NYT Co. already operates International Herald Tribune as its international edition, new launches are coming under the “New York Times” banner.

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Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reports that Livraria Cultura will sell the e-readers for lower prices than imported Kindles. Amazon has not officially launched in Brazil but is expected to do so by the end of this year.

Livraria Cultura, which has 14 stores in Brazil, already sells 330,000 ebooks through its website; following the partnership with Kobo, it will sell 3 million. Only 15,000 of the ebooks are in Portuguese.

Ebook sales makes up less than 1 percent of overall book sales in Brazil, but the country is believed to have huge potential for digital reading. Bowker recently found that 18 million Brazilian adults with Internet access have read an ebook.

Photo courtesy of Flickr / gaby bra

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It’s an approach that has worked well for big names like Skype, Wikia, Opera and many others.

But guess what? That’s not necessarily the way it works anymore. Partly because of Europe’s financial crisis, some of the “old” countries are now becoming the jumping-off point for services in developing economies, and not the other way around.

Take Portugal. Once it paved the way for the modern age as a nation of explorers who built the first global empire in history. These days, however, it’s fast becoming a center for inexpensive startup workers, especially with those companies looking to expand into Brazil and elsewhere.

A fundamental shift

Here are a few examples. HouseTrip, a holiday rental service similar to Airbnb that is regarded by many as one of Europe’s hottest startups, is headquartered in London but has a large number of service staff in Lisbon. Or what about Webnographer, a UX startup that has had offices in the city for a couple of years?

But the prime candidate is probably Rocket Internet, the notorious German clone factory that has a significant development center in the northern Portuguese city of Porto. It houses at least 150 programmers and support staff, who are all building crucial elements of major international properties like Groupon and Zalando.

For Rocket and its masterminds, the Samwer Brothers, Portugal provides a great base for dramatically expanding its business in developing economies across South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Miguel Pinto, the managing director of the Porto center, confirmed recently that the team was focused on technical development and would carry on expanding at pace.

But Carlos Silva, a Lisbon resident and co-founder of crowdfunding startup Seedrs, says it’s a confluence of bigger circumstances that makes it sensible to hire staff in Portugal for companies focused on markets like Brazil.

“The Brazilian market is definitely a very big and interesting market for European companies, but — at least for a startup — setting up a base there is not an easy task,” says Silva. “Getting work permits is complex, and the country is still quite bureaucratic. Portugal, on the other hand, is part of the EU, making it very easy to attract talent from all over, has a very simple process to create companies and deal with legal and tax obligations, and is geographically much closer to European centers of entrepreneurship.”

The free movement of workers inside Europe certainly helps, but that’s not all that’s going on. There’s also the fact that the economy is under severe pressure. Portugal has the lowest GDP per capita in Western Europe, and the sovereign debt crisis has been kicking the nation in its soft parts for a long time now.

Joao Martins, the CEO of Porto-based news aggregator app Niiiws, thinks the lack of opportunities at home is a big part of this recent change.

“There are at least six great engineering universities in Portugal, graduating a lot of very well-prepared young people to work,” he says. “The problem is the general economic environment, the work culture and the lack of management skills. You can hire one of these guys for $1500, but you can’t find more than a dozen really big Portuguese IT companies.”

Meanwhile Brazil is getting more and more expensive as the startup economy explodes: According to Payscale.com, the median salary for an IT manager in Brazil is 136,000 BRL ($66,000) but the same job in Portugal is just €30,000 ($36,000).

Who’s next?

The connection between the two countries makes a lot of sense — not least because of the linguistic connection and the imbalance in populations (Portugal has around 10 million people; Brazil has 196 million). But in the past it would have been Portugal and its entrepreneurs taking command of those emerging markets rather than simply supplying them with low-cost talent.

The signaling has become even stronger recently. Even the prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, got in on the act, telling local people struggling to find jobs that they should emigrate to South America.

That may be excessive — and Coelho came in for plenty of criticism — but it’s clear there’s been a shift.

“Portugal has always been an excellent platform to enter not only the Brazilian market but also other developing markets like Angola and Mozambique or even India, through its connections with Goa, and China, through Macau,” says Carlos Silva. “Bigger companies are already taking advantage of it by having participations in some of Portuguese biggest companies like Portugal Telecom and EDP and, as you said, some startups are starting to do the same. I would not be surprised to see more startups follow that same route.”

The shoe is definitely now on the other foot. The question is whether this change will happen elsewhere in Europe too.

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