Major Flemish- and French-language newspaper publishers, magazine publishers and three TV broadcasters in the country have teamed to use Media ID, a common platform for user registration and management, reports the national De Morgen.

Created by Flemish government-funded innovation research institute iMinds, which claims to have “mobilized the Flemish media sector on an unprecedented scale”, launch is penciled in for an April test, followed by a September full launch.

Media ID appears primarily to be created for registration, allowing publishers to better understand and profile individual consumers. Publishers in the last couple of years have become more interested in leveraging data about their readers — although services like Facebook, Google  and Twitter let users log in to such third-party sites, those sites do not own all the user data.

But Media ID also supports payment. In keeping with the current global trend, participating media houses will variously begin limiting free access to web content and requiring payment for more of it.

Both Corelio and Persgroep will stop republishing articles from their newspapers online for free. Broadcaster Vlaamse Media Maatschappij will use Media ID to power part of its iWatch catch-up TV service, Pond has confirmed it will use it to charge micropayments for episodes and VRT wants to leverage Media ID to offer viewers customisation but not charges.

Sticking together

Such industry-wide cooperation is more common in some non-English-speaking countries than in markets like the UK, where animosity between intensely competitive publishers reigns and previously scuppered a News Corporation attempt — labeled Project Alesia — to build a common paid digital news aggregator.

We have already seen the Project Piano payment system launch to provide paid access to small parts of publishers sites’ with one bill in Slovenia, Slovakia and Poland, albeit with few indications of large-scale success.

But initiatives like Media ID in Belgium appear to have created consensus in a country that is itself divided between Flemish- and French-speaking regions.

In 2012, Belgian papers launched GoPress, a jointly-owned kiosk for delivering digital editions of newspapers and magazines for individual prices. Media ID would extend their digital payments cooperation to web content.

Google as giver

And the publishers’ recent supposed victory over Google creates the conditions for their increased chance of success.

In 2007, a court ruled that Google did not have the right to run story excerpts Belgian newspapers’ websites. Google duly pulled the newspaper sites’ out of Google News — ironically, much to their chagrin. They later struck an agreement to restore that content in mid-2011 despite ongoing tensions.

But in December the sides reached a new agreement in which Google will pay the publishers €5 million, supposedly through advertising on their properties, in order to settle the dispute. This means that, whilst newspapers’ excerpts will remain accessible on Google News, publishers are monetising their Google relationship on two fronts — both in income from Google and through the traffic that exposure through Google will bring to their soon-to-be-paid websites.

Ironically, however, part of the agreed olive branch was Google’s assistance in powering paywalls and subscription models for the papers — likely using its Google Wallet system. Now it seems the publishers are picking their own vendor.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Google said it has resolved a long-running dispute with Belgian newspapers that have demanded copyright fees every time Google displays a link or excerpts to one of their stories. Google’s announcement says the parties are “collaborating” to make money but also takes pains to note that “we are not paying the Belgian publishers or authors to include their content in our services”. Oh, really?

US press outlets have noted Google is paying all the legal fees but have generally framed the deal as a tie or a win for Google. The Europeans, however, have been less gracious. Le Monde‘s triumphant account begins by explaining that the Belgian papers “forced Google to bend” and that Google will “compensate” papers and journalists to the tune of “2 to 3 percent of sales” — or “around 5 million euros” ($6.5 million).

So what exactly happened? Did Google pay up or not? The solution to the mystery lies in a part of the blog post where Google explains the ways it will work with the papers, including: “Google will advertise its services on the publishers’ media.” In other words, the American search giant appears to have bought millions of dollars of advertising in the hopes of staving off a direct copyright levy. The company did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

On its face, this is not a bad deal for Google. Given the anti-American regulatory climate in Europe, the company had a weak hand to play. Paying $6 millon to end the Belgian headache may be a good investment, especially as the company can still claim (technically at least) that it still does not pay copyright fees for newspaper excerpts.

The danger, of course, is that the rest of Europe will soon be beating a path to Google’s door demanding similar payouts. As we’ve noted, France and Germany are already kicking up dust over the copyright issue too (so is Brazil). The Le Monde story will only embolden them.

In the bigger picture, European news publishers would be better served by dropping the half-baked copyright claims (Google’s fair use case for excerpts is strong) and getting on with the painful process of digitization. The continent has wonderful newspapers but the ongoing prevalence of print is astounding compared to North America.

(Image by Sergey Mironov via Shutterstock)

On Tuesday, the group said its Axel Springer Digital Classifieds group is buying 80 percent of Belgian property listings site Immoweb from its founding Rousseaux family and Produpress for €127.5 million ($164 million) – the latest in a spree nearing €1 billion this year.

In a nine-month trading update on Wednesday, the group says 2012 gains from digital media “will more than compensate for slightly lower revenues in the national print business and lower revenues in the international print business”.

The outfit publishes the Bild and Die Welt newspapers but has a roster of portal content sites and recently has been buying heavily in to online classified advertising services including French property ads site SeLoger for a whopping €633 million and TotalJobs for £110 million.

The publisher also operates autohaus24.de (auto classifieds), immonet.de (real estate) and buecher.de (e-tail) but its new push in to classified sites minus the content comes through its recently formed Digital Classifieds unit, a JV funded with General Atlantic.

On Wednesday, Springer reported digital media were “the growth engine of the group”, with category revenues growing 21.5 percent over the last year to 34.6 percent of its total. Digital advertising is now more than half of the group’s total (55.5 percent).

“Our digital activities, in part, are generating high double-digit margins,” CEO Mathias Döpfner (pictured) said, without clarifying which part.

So company revenue has grown by 3.9 percent despite a “weak” print advertising market and “ongoing slow economic conditions”.

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!”

Such an initiative, GoPress, is now rolling out softly to offer chargeable access to replica editions.

GoPress is owned jointly bynine Belgian publishers: Concentra Uitgeversmaatschappij, Corelio Publishing, De Vlijt, Editions de l’Avenir, IPM, Mediafin, Persgroep Publishing, Rossel and Roularta Media Group.

It is powered jointly by digital newspaper scanning agencies Mediargus, which is owned by Belgian newspapers, and PressBanking to make the editions available as HTML5 across multiple devices.

But editions, 32 of which are so far available, are priced individually rather than with a single pricepoint for the whole kaboodle.

All of which makes GoPress not unlike PressReader, the digital replica clearing house that stocks more than 2,100 newspaper editions and which nevertheless includes both individual and all-in monthly subscription

Users can authenticate using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Payment is powered by Dutch online content payment facilitator Cleeng, which already powers payment on France’s LaTribune, which now charges for some of its web articles.

GoPress is scheduled to be in full-swing by summer. But it’s by no means certain that delivering newspapers to digital screens in their traditional format will set Belgian readers’ worlds alight.

Belgian news publishers have been amongst the world’s most vociferous when it comes to protecting their position against what they see as pilfering search engines.

Update: As expected, BT has confirmed it will wait for a court order before proceeding. More details below.

This morning, the BPI released a statement saying that it has sent a letter to BT to request it to block Pirate Bay. “If BT will not agree to block voluntarily, then it has been asked to consent to a court order,” the statement read.

The BPI, which says it is teaming up with other organizations representing the creative industries, is banking on a precedent set by a case decided in October in which BT was ordered by the courts to block another site, Newzbin2, that facilitates illegal downloads.

That was the first time that a UK ISP has been ordered to block a pirate site, although such actions have been in place in other countries like Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Belgium and Sweden since 2009.

We have reached out to BT for comment on the situation, and we will update this post as we learn more. The operator is expected to put out a statement later today.

But we understand from sources that it’s not likely BT will comply with the initial, voluntary request because that could imply a dangerously slippery slope. “BT cannot block web sites willy nilly,” said the source.

Furthermore, BT has said as much itself. During the Newzbin2 case brought by the Motion Picture Association, BT had this to say: “This is a helpful judgement, which provides clarity on this complex issue. It clearly shows that rights holders need to prove their claims and convince a judge to make a court order. BT has consistently said that rights holders need to take this route.”

Update: BT’s response, as we wrote, will be to wait for a court order, not do it voluntarily. “We can confirm we are now in receipt of a letter from the BPI [ requesting that BT block the Pirate Bay site]. BT is considering its response. In line with the Newzbin judgment, a court order will be needed before any blocking could begin. BT is currently focused on implementation of that order.”

Given the clear proof that the BitTorrent site is helping distribute thousands of pieces of content, with no royalties paid to the rights owners, it is likely that BT will work with the BPI in getting the court order to close the site through legal means. The precedent of the Newzbin2 case is likely to make that process relatively easy, depending on who comes to Pirate Bay’s defense.

“We would not tolerate Counterfeits “R” Us on the High Street – if we want economic growth, we cannot accept illegal rip-off sites on the internet either. We hope that BT will do the right thing and block The Pirate Bay,” the CEO of the BPI, Geoff Taylor, said in a statement today.

BT, if ordered by the court, will have 14 days to block the site and foot the bill for the change.

Some deals were well telegraphed but not the scope of the announcement, made at the Mipcom TV trade show in Cannes Wednesday. The services vary by country, with the bulk available in the U.S. The partners include UK broadcasters BBC, Channel 4, Channel Five (no ITV); online services like YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), Dailymotion and Lovefilm; Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) through Xfinity and NBC Universal, ESPN (NYSE: DIS) and Verizon in the U.S.. (Full list below.)

Xbox Live users gain access to some services through free registration; Xbox Live Gold is a subscription plan. Initially, Microsoft wanted to limit the new services that would be streamed through the Xbox to the Xbox Live Gold tier but that caused problems for the BBC and some other networks required under their charters to be available to the widest tier on a service. Microsoft bent, we’ve been told: those networks will be on the Xbox Live tier, available in their countries for no additional fee while others in the same country — Channel 4 in the UK, for instance — are only on the pay plan.

All of the partners’ announcements are coordinated to refer only to features and not to strategy.

• The BBC is making no comment about any of this. “The BBC is pleased to confirm the completion of a partnership deal with Microsoft that will enable the BBC to make on-demand services available to all UK users of the Xbox Live platform,” a spokesperson tells paidcontent. “We’re not yet in a position to go into any specifics – or confirm a launch date – but we’ll share more details as soon as we can.”
• Lovefilm, which previously was shut out by Microsoft’s seeking a slice of its subscription revenue, has not responded to our questions.
• Channel Four, whose cross-platform 4oD service can only be used by paid-up Xbox Live gold subscribers, has also not responded.

That raises questions about how and when Google plans to link up these new commercial operations.

Daily Deal, which already has operations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, also has plans to expand to Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, according TNW, which first reported the acquisition.

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

Google itself has not confirmed the purchase directly, but a note on the Daily Deal site from the company’s two founders, brothers Fabian and Ferry Heilemann, indicates that the business will become a part of Google’s existing daily deals effort, Offers:

“What began as a two-person startup less than two years ago has transformed into a trusted platform to connect businesses with consumers,” the write. “By combining our expertise with the Offers team at Google, we hope to expand our efforts to provide even greater deals to consumers.” The site now also redirects all press contacts to {encode=”press@google.com” title=”Google”}.

For the moment, Google Offers is only available in cities in the U.S. That means the purchase of the Daily Deal site could give Google an easy route to ramping up the service in Europe as well. Whether that will mean growing the Daily Deal footprint even further than Heilemanns’ plans for the continent, or buying other local deals sites, remains unclear at the moment.

Google Wallet. Meanwhile, just as the NFC World Congress event is kicking off in France, it looks like Google has started to roll out its new payment service, Google Wallet.

This was announced back in May and initially will work in the U.S. only, on the Nexus S device being sold via Sprint (NYSE: S) and in cooperation with MasterCard.

As with the Daily Deal buy, Google has not confirmed that Wallet is going live, but a report in Tech Crunch over the weekend showed a leaked document alerting retailers that the service would start today, September 19. Now pictures are starting to emerge advertising the service in-store.

That the two news items coincided on the same day also raises questions of how — and when — Google will link up Offers and Wallet: while right now Google’s Offers service can be used directly on an Android phone through the Google Shopper app but the simple, contactless payment services of Wallet has only just gotten off the ground.

Update: Google has officially announced the launch of its Google Wallet payment service today. The service, which uses the Nexus S 4G on the Sprint network, requires users to have a Citi MasterCard credit card and or a top-up from another credit card to the Google Prepaid Card — and they will need to find points of sale that accept PayPass NFC payments. Those who sign up for the service before the end of the year get a $10 credit.

According to a blog post from Osama Bedier, Google’s VP of payments, Visa, Discover and American Express cards and POS readers will be added in “future versions” of the Wallet.

Google Offers will automatically sync to a person’s Google Wallet account.

According to figures from Yipit last week (via Reuters), total revenue from Google Offers fell by 23 percent between August and July; the number of deals on the service went up by 22 percent in that time. Revenue per deal fell 37 percent, as the number of vouchers sold per deal was down by 46 percent.

There is a natural connection between the two kinds of services: In May, when Wallet and Offers were announced by Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s VP of commerce, she described how Wallet would be about more than just payments, and would also be used for loyalty programs, check-ins and other transactions. Meanwhile, the promise of Offers would be about getting them on the go. Google believes that e-commerce rvenues will exceed $1 trillion by 2013, and it wants to make sure it is in on that game.

Google is not the only one working in these areas: on the deals front it is already competing against dominant Groupon, big LivingSocial, and fast-rising Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), among many others. NFC is still nascent although today Orange in France announced that it too would start to roll out the first a fourth device for its commercial NFC service, the Samsung Galaxy S II. (Samsung perhaps the unspoken winner here, with a role in both NFC news announcements today.)

In its last quarterly earnings report, Google noted that it made $6.562 billion from its advertising business, or 96 percent of its total revenues.

To be sure, the new name is not exactly streamlined and zippy, and sounds confusingly similar to one of Sony’s existing product divisions:

“Sony Network Entertainment introduces Sony Entertainment Network,” reads the Sony blog post describing the new platform.

Sony Entertainment Network will encompass Video on Demand powered by Qriocity, which will now be called simply Video Unlimited; and Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity, which will become Music Unlimited; and the PlayStation Network. The changes were detailed by Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, at the IFA show in Berlin, Germany, today.

While the rebranding could simplify the Sony’s cloud entertainment offerings to the market, it will also have the added bonus of taking away a name that became synonymous with the hacking scandal that hit Sony earlier this year, in which millions of accounts were compromised around the world and the network shut down for weeks, and which it says will result in a “signficant decrease” in sales this year.

The announcement coincided with Sony’s other big news today from IFA: the official unveiling of two new tablets — the company’s first foray into the market currently dominated by iPad.

In the publicity around those two tablets, Sony touted the many entertainment services it had in place that would link up with the new devices, including Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited — without mentioning the Qriocity brand.

In addition to being available on Sony’s tablets, Sony announced today that Music Unlimited will also start to be offered in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands and Belgium by the end of this year.

» Amazon could have two sizes of tablet in mind for a launch: a seven-inch model to come out this year; and a 10-inch design to be released in 2012. The company has also been looking at a redesign of its main site to make it more tablet-friendly. (via TNW)

» Not all developers love iOS, it seems: a recent iOS conference in China found that many developers saw it as high-risk investment, citing issues around discoverability and the approvals process. (via DoNews)

» More on Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and China, by way of Wikileaks: Apparently the cables released this week by Wikileaks have also revealed that the company has hired an expert in fake Viagra to combat counterfeiting. (via Sophos, Cult of Mac)

» Apple is looking at a way of diagnosing iOS devices over the web for its employees — a sign of a service that could get rolled out externally in the future? (via 9to5mac, Hardmac)

» GupShup, which runs an SMS-based social network in India, has raised $10 million in venture funding. (via Economic Times)

» FilmOn, the HD Internet-based video service, has launched a football channel showing premium matches and notes its live-TV app now number-one free app in the UK, Netherlands and Belgium. (via FilmOn)

» Sony (NYSE: SNE), Toshiba and Hitachi are merging their LDC operations, and taking $2.6 billion in funding from the Japanese government, to help boost competitiveness against South Korea and Taiwan. (via Reuters)

» Loopt, the check-in service to competes against the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, has started to expand internationally. (via Loopt)

» PaymentOne has signed a carrier billing deal with Telefonica (NYSE: TEF), the second billing deal the mobile operator has announced this week. (via PaymentOne)