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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

In a case heard today in an appeals court in Sydney, at least two of the judges made comments that at least make it sound like they were giving Samsung a bit more credit, and casting a bit of doubt on the original decision made by Justice Annabelle Bennett to prohibit Samsung from selling its tablet in the country.

Federal Court Justice Lindsay Foster called Justice Bennett’s ruling “terribly fair to Apple and not terribly fair to Samsung.” (via Bloomberg)

Meanwhile, another judge on the panel of three, Justice John Dowsett, said Apple’s arguments for an injunction were “very speculative.” Apple had claimed that it needed the injunction because Samsung would otherwise get an unfair advantage in the market with its portfolio of phones and tablets, and that it would have been impossible to track those sales in the market to claim damages after the fact.

Does that sound like it might be an overstatement by Apple? Well, it’s not the only one doing some serious posturing:

Samsung has been arguing that if it cannot get enough time to sell the product before the new year, it may have to scrap the launch of the device in Australia altogether, because technology will have moved along too fast and the device will be outdated by the time the actual case gets heard next year. Considering that the tablet was at the top end of device specifications when it was unveiled, and that the iPad 2 and Kindle, both very much selling strong, are less souped up than the 10.1 Galaxy Tab, that too may be a bit of a stretch of the truth.

Samsung is a significantly bigger player than Apple in the wider mobile world, but when it comes to the area of tablets the iPad from Apple is by far the biggest seller.

Apple originally filed a case against Samsung in April when it accused the Android-based tablet maker of slavishly copying its designs for tablets and smartphones. Apple has taken its case to a number of countries in Europe, the U.S., Asia and Australia. Samsung has been hitting back with patent suits of its own over wireless technology licenses. So far, Apple has managed to get injunctions in Germany and Australia with one overturned in the Netherlands. Apple faces an injunction too in Germany, but over a case concerning Motorola (NYSE: MMI) rather than Samsung.

The appeals judges in Sydney will likely produce a verdict next week.