The annual exercise is supposed to trigger a flurry of “time to get tough on copyright” editorials in the countries that are named and shamed. The list is also a great tool for content owners and their lobbyists to browbeat politicians into passing US-style copyright legislation.

But something funny happened this year. The list, released yesterday, got little traction with many foreign media outlets which now seem to have decided that America has cried copyright wolf once too often.

This year’s “watchlist” was reported in US news outlets (especially those in Los Angeles) but was largely ignored by foreign media outlets that usually parrot its findings.

About time. The reality is that countries like Canada have strong copyright law. It’s insulting to put Canada and other US allies like India on a list of countries that don’t respect basic rule of law.

This is also a good time to recall that more copyright law is not always better copyright law. The US model, for instance, includes penalties of $150,000 for a single violation and copyright terms that last over a century. This year, America also outraged another ally, Britain, by extraditing one of its 23-year-old citizens over a downloading website. Is the model for the rest of the world to follow?

US content owners are right to say there are holes to patch in copyright law. But lies, hysteria and insults are no way to get the job done.

It’s time for the US to throw away the stupid watch list once and for all.

Two Ontario law firms and one Vancouver firm are suing Apple and the Canadian subsidiaries of Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Hachette. The Star cites one complaint that says Apple and the publishers’ alleged collusion increased e-book prices by “as much as 50 per cent for most titles over Amazon’s previous prices and reduced competition for e-books in Canada and elsewhere.”

Canadian attorney Charles Wright of Ontario firm Siskinds LLP said, “I would expect that if there’s a change in business practices Canadians would benefit, but the case filed in the U.S. is on behalf of U.S. residents and seeks refunds to U.S. residents and so that would not do anything for Canadian consumers who have already made their purchases. A Canadian action is necessary and desirable to get compensation for Canadian consumers.”

Back in the U.S., in addition to the DOJ suit, Apple and the five publishers are the subject of class-action lawsuits and lawsuits by the states. All the parties met in court yesterday to coordinate the three-pronged suit. All 50 states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico may reach a settlement with HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette, which would effectively trump the class-action suit.

The Australian government is also considering a lawsuit against Apple and the five publishers.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user futureatlas.com

It’s worth watching how Le Huffington Post develops, since AOL (NYSE: AOL) and the Huffington Post Media Group are following the partnership pattern with other non-English launches later this year.

The blog will team up with El Pais in Spain for a Spanish edition, which is coming online in March. And — as we first reported last week — it will also launch an Italian site with L’Espresso.

It’s not known how AOL structures its business relationships with HuffPo partners, but paidContent understands that the French groups all share equal equity in the Le Huffington Post. None of the parties have confirmed this, however.

The original, HuffingtonPost.com, has become one of the most popular news sites in the U.S., and one of the most-visited of all sites. Figures from June 2011 showed that it had actually surpassed the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) as the most popular news site in the country. We have contacted comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) for more recent figures and will update this post when we get them.

Update: comScore tells us that in fact in the month of December, HuffingtonPost.com was visited more than any newspaper site in the U.S., with six million more unique visitors than the next-biggest brand, the New York Times — although if you added in other properties like NYT’s About.com, the New York Times’ group would have about 76.5 million uniques. Meanwhile, in the UK, HuffPo.co.uk is at number-11 at the moment. The full tables ranking popular sites in the U.S. and UK are at the end of this post. [original post continues below]

Before today, HuffPo had launched two other international editions — both in English — HuffingtonPost.ca in Canada, and HuffingtonPost.co.uk in the UK.

Both of these were launched on HuffPo’s own steam, without a helping hand from a local partner. That may have been easier to do: given the common English language across the three territories, it’s likely that Canada and the UK were already bringing in some traffic to the U.S. site, and so were natural first-efforts in an international strategy.

Some have wondered if HuffPo could succeed in the UK, however, because the many established UK national dailies already have a strong culture of opinion-led journalism — the kind that has become a popular mainstay of blogging and forms a cornerstone of HuffPo’s success in the U.S. (one other being a lot of aggregation, a one-stop shop for news; another being a sheer proliferation of content, much of it written for free).

It’s perhaps unfair to compare HuffingtonPost.co.uk against other news sites, only six months into its existence. Worth pointing out that AOL, citing figures from comScore, says that traffic on the UK site has been growing steadily since launching in the summer of 2011:

“HuffPost UK currently has 4.1 million 3.5 million unique visitors,” a spokesperson told paidContent in an email, “and has grown nearly 50 percent since it launched six months ago. The site has a large, vibrant group blog, with an expanding roster of 2,500 people who have used its blogging platform, including Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt, Noel Gallagher, Liz Hurley, Joanna Lumley and Ricky Gervais. Engagement is also strong and growing, with users posting a record 7,000 comments on a single day last week.”

Update 2: That 4.1 million figure is higher than comScore’s numbers detailed below because it includes incoming traffic from outside the UK, while comScore’s numbers measure only UK-based traffic. [original post follows below]

HuffPo first announced its partnership with Le Monde and LNEI in October 2010 — meaning that it is moving quick on getting these products to market once making them public. This is only one part of the company’s Francophonic strategy, though: the Canadian HuffPo is apparently also launching a Quebec edition of HuffingtonPost.ca this month, too.

Source: comScore

The purpose of the news black-out was to ensure that election reports from the east didn’t distort voting intentions in the west. It would be like forcing CNN to hold off reporting on the outcome of New York’s presidential vote until the polls closed in California.

Americans might find the law ridiculous or a free speech violation but the Canadian Supreme Court upheld it in 2007, saying the law had an overall positive effect that justified the speech restrictions. The Vancouver blogger was eventually fined $1,000.

But in recent years the growth of the Internet and especially social media made the law seem increasingly untenable. In recent elections, the Canadian government was in the uncomfortable legal position of having to decide whether to prosecute people who posted election news on Facebook or Twitter. Groups of Canadians also warned they would participate in a tweet-in show of civil disobedience.

The government’s acknowledgement of modern technology was reflected in the way it announced the news today — in a series of tweets by a government minister:

In recent years, the reporting ban also came to seem unnecessary after election officials staggered polling hours so that polls in the west closed only about an hour after those in the east. Canada has six time zones: Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern, Atlantic and Newfoundland.

The report was astute in most respects. But it was wrong in suggesting that a RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) takeover would meet stiff interference from the Government of Canada.

In a December 28 article, the New York Times’ Dealbook reported that RIM’s share price had recently spiked amidst takeover rumors but that investors should be realistic about the obstacles to a sale. Dealbook perceived one of the chief obstacles as follows:

RIM is also a point of pride for the Canadian government, which has been increasingly reluctant to let foreign companies buy major domestic corporations.

Other publications reporting on a possible RIM takeover have since repeated that Canada might block a sale.

This speculation is unfounded. While the Canadian government can screen large transactions to ensure they are a “net benefit” to the country, it has used this power exactly twice since 1985.

The notion that the government has become more protectionist is based in Canada’s decision to block an Australian mining giant from taking over the country’s main potash producer in 2010. That unusual decision was driven, however, by pressure from a regional government and political ally looking to preserve tax revenue.

There are no similar circumstances surrounding Research In Motion. Dealbook’s contention that RIM is a “point of pride” is true but only to the extent that Canadians have long cited BlackBerry to promote the fantasy that Canada is a global center of innovation.

Overall, the fact remains that Canada’s current government is ideologically in favor of free markets and would almost certainly allow RIM to be sold. Canadians might gasp but no more than they did when other national icons like Tim Hortons or the Montreal Canadiens hockey team were acquired by American interests.

Then there is the fact that Canadian investors are also being hurt by RIM’s current TweedleDum-TweedleDee management structure.

According to Stephen Scott, a professional investor and constitutional law expert at McGill University:

“My own guess is that sale of the whole of a crashing corporation (or sale of its assets) would not be blocked by the Government of Canada in the same way as has been (or would be) a rising enterprise. For one thing, too much pressure by desperate shareholders, who would be certain to go ballistic if blocked when trying to recover some of their investments.”

Dealbook cites real obstacles to the prayed-for sale of RIM, including the high price tag and the obstinance of its co-CEO’s. But political interference from Canada should be far from top of this list.

Other forms of help may be on the way, however. Sources are reporting today that a management shake-up at the Waterloo, Ontario company may be on the way.

According to figures from app analytics firm Flurry, there were 1.2 billion apps downloaded to Android and iOS devices between December 25 and December 31, based on the top 20 mobile countries that Flurry regularly tracks.

The downloads even broke through the predictions made at the beginning of the week by Flurry itself when it noted that Christmas day saw a record 6.8 million Android and iOS device activations. For the whole week, Flurry now says that it believes 20 million Android and iOS devices were activated.

These higher download figures are probably due to that big influx of new devices over the week — and possibly a rush of gift cards for apps, too — so it may well be that in the weeks ahead the average number of downloads return to sub-billion figures before continuing their steady growth once again.

It should be noted that Flurry’s research does not indicate how those 1.2 billion apps broke down in terms of platforms or categories — whether they are games, entertainment apps or those providing information. Also: Flurry’s track downloads in the “official” app stores, the Android Market and Apple’s App Store — and not those downloads in non-official app stores, such as the many that exist for Android apps in countries like China. If counted, this would likely mean even more apps download.

Flurry says the 1.2 billion figure represents an increase of 60 percent on the average downloads between December 4 and December 17, when a mere 750 million apps were downloaded in the top 20 countries. Flurry says that the week of December 18-24 saw that figure start to climb, with 857 million downloads.

Country break-down. The U.S. was far and away biggest country of all in Flurry’s research when it came to app downloads for the week. The country accounted for 509 million, or 42.3 percent, of all the downloads.

The next-biggest country was China, at 99 million. Considering that China (again, based on Flurry’s figures) accounts for one-third of the world’s smartphone market, and the U.S. for 41 percent, that’s a somewhat disproportionate break-down. Flurry’s explanation: most of China doesn’t celebrate Christmas. “While the United States widely celebrates Christmas, China is largely non-religious, with over 60% of the population considering themselves agnostic or atheist. In China, Christians make up just 3 – 4% of the population,” it writes. One other possibility could be that China also has a lot of popular Android app stores that operate outside the official Android Market; downloads in those stores are less easy to track, and are not tracked by Flurry.

Following Flurry’s theory about largely non-Christian territories (and, it seems, not bitten too hard by the non-religious Xmas consumer bug) two other countries also slipped in download rankings compared to their smartphone installed bases: South Korea (4th-largest smartphone base) and Japan (5th-largest) ranked at 7th and 10th places for app downloads last week. Conversely, Canada busted past its 8th-place smartphone ranking to have the 4th-biggest app download volume.

Originally announced in September, the Timeline has been so popular that over one million people have signed up to the developer beta to access the product, according to a blog post from product manager Samuel Lessin.

Now the service is getting a more formal public showing, starting with the digitally forward country of New Zealand before rolling it out “more broadly in the near future.”

Facebook’s Timeline feature is a new interface that will let you offer friends a curated view of your life, with specified photos, posts, apps and other Facebook content laid out in a more graphically engaging way. The idea here is to create another way of flagging to friends what you are consuming and doing in a way that they might not otherwise see in their activity streams, where items can drop off quickly if users have a lot of active Facebook friends.

Along with the Timeline changes, Facebook in September also began to add a number of new content partners to its platform, as part of its move to transform it into a media hub.

However, one company that had to stay away, in the U.S. at least, has been Netflix: a 1988 law, the Video Privacy Protection Act, prohibited the company from sharing its users’ video playlists on the site, unless Netflix got specific approval for each video. (Netflix has been able to roll out its Facebook app in other markets where it operates like Canada and Latin America.) This has been a thorn in Netflix’s side and the company has been hard at work airing its arguments for why it should be able to share that data.

As of this week, that act appears to be one step closer to getting repealed. According to this report from the AP, the House has approved an update that would allow Netflix to share the data as long as it got a customer’s blanket consent, which it could get online with a simple click.

The bill is now going to the Senate for approval.

Getting the Netflix app to work on Facebook would not just be a boost for Facebook, but for Netflix, too, which, at 24 million subscribers, is one of the biggest streaming sites in the country, but needs all the streaming service recommendations it can get. The company is facing an uphill battle for profitability at a time when media companies are demanding big fees to stream their content and many competitors are wading into the streaming waters with video offers of their own.

The $15-million Urban Airship deal was led by strategic investors Verizon and Salesforce, with participation also from existing investors Foundry Group and True Ventures. This is the third round of funding for the company, which has raised $21 million to date.

Urban Airship, which gives developers tools to incorporate services like push notifications and payments into their apps for iOS, Blackberry and Android devices, says in a blog post announcing the deal that it has seen explosive growth in the last year, with a 1000 percent increase in traffic to its APIs this month. Currently the company is processing some one billion notifications per month, with seven billion tallied so far this year.

The Verizon investment in Urban Airship points to how carriers continue to hold out hope that they will play a part the growth of mobile services, not just as passive networks but as active players. It’s not clear now whether Verizon already provides some of its billing and location services as a back end to Urban Airship, but something like this could well be on the cards. Salesforce, meanwhile, is seeing a lot of growth of its mobile services, and you can equally see how it would open up new doors of opportunity for a company like this to integrate Urban Airship’s offering into its wider framework enabling enterprise support systems.

Although we are still seeing a lot of money being pumped into smaller companies that are enabling different aspects of app production, there are also signs that there is some consolidation also starting to take shape. Urban Airship itself just last week acquired a competing platform, SimpleGeo.

Strangeloop. The $10 million raised by Vancouver, Canada-based Strangeloop, meawhile, is the second round of funding for the startup, which has now picked up around $22 million to date.

The actual investors have not been named, although TechCrunch reports that they are a group of “Canadian super angels.”

Strangeloop, which started life as a company focused on speeding up the load time for web pages as viewed on PCs, has more recently moved into offering its product for mobile web pages as well. Getting these, and the mobile web “apps” that are starting to appear in increasing numbers, up to speed will be essential if those promoting the mobile web over apps want to claim better performance: today, as a general rule (although not in all cases), native apps tend to show faster performance than those designed for the mobile web.

Through its literally-titled Mobile Site Optimizer product, Strangeloop offers different tools to enhance sites built on standards like HTML5 and SPDY from Google.

The company’s CEO, Jonathan Bixby, wrote in a blog post that the company has seen 200 percent growth quarter on quarter, and counts big names like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), Visa and Travelocity among its customers.

He adds that the funding will be used to expand its business, particularly in Europe, Asia and Latin America — three regions where he says the company is seeing “huge market demand.”

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) says it’s made “partnerships with both major international and Canadian publishers, including Random House, McClelland & Stewart, Douglas & McIntyre, House of Anansi and Dundurn. As a result, it’s easy to find popular best-selling and Canadian authors like Margaret Atwood and Ami McKay.” The store contains almost two million free public domain titles and “hundreds of thousands” of titles for purchase.

Canadian booksellers Campus eBookstore and McNally Robinson (not to be confused with NYC’s McNally Jackson) will sell Google e-books through their websites.

Google opened its eBookstore in the U.S. in December 2010, and its first international launch was in the UK last month. It’s expected to open a store in Australia this year, as well.

The Google eBookstore has struggled to gain market share against the Kindle and Nook stores in the U.S. In Canada, it faces competition from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Kobo.

The first national class action was filed in Montreal on Tuesday by a Canadian who apparently was not happy with RIM’s decision to make peace with users by offering them free apps. The second suit was reportedly filed a day later in southern California on behalf of all U.S. BlackBerry users, including 2.4 million users in California alone.

Ordinarily, when a major company suffers a well-publicized gaffe and is hit with a class action, it is time to wince and wonder how much it will cost them. In the case of the RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) class actions, however, there are several features of the lawsuits that make them look small-time.

Note first that it took nearly two weeks for lawsuits to be filed over the BlackBerry service debacle. This is an eternity in the world of class action suits. The way the class action business works is that lawyers keep boiler-plate documents and stand-by plaintiffs on hand so that they are ready to file a suit at the drop of a hat. Often, dozens of firms will file similar suits within hours or days of each other and then jostle among themselves about who will get lion’s share of the work (and pay-out).

The fact that two weeks elapsed before a suit was filed likely means one thing: big class action firms looked at the case and didn’t smell money. According to an analysis by Moira Herbst at Reuters (NYSE: TRI), the firms may have been deterred by forced arbitration clauses or by the fact that it may be hard to frame a service outage as consumer fraud or breach of contract.

In the absence of the class action heavy hitters, it appears that two minnows have stepped in to test the waters. It is also no coincidence that this week’s lawsuits were filed in two of North America’s most class action friendly jurisdictions — California and Quebec. The Canadian province is especially attractive because it provides a fund to subsidize class action suits and because it is a civil law jurisdiction where plaintiffs do not have to identify a specific type of legal harm.

As for the California suit, the complaint is not yet online but the lead plaintiff is reportedly a Sprint (NYSE: S) customer who claims he has an “implied contact” with RIM because the company provided him with services.

So far, none of this sounds like fodder for litigation a la Erin Brockovich. Unless any big league class action firms come of the woodwork, RIM appears free for now to focus on its pile of other problems.

RIM Quebec Class Action