That company is IGB Eletrônica SA (Gradiente), and it applied for the “IPHONE” trademark all the back in 2000. Apple released its first iPhone in 2007. The Wall Street Journal reports that the agency who oversees patents in Brazil said that it denied Apple’s trademark application because of IGB’s rights to the name. Matthew Cowley and Loretta Chao report:

Marcelo Chimento, spokesman for Brazil’s National Institute of Industrial Property, or INPI, said Apple is contesting the decision, charging that Gradiente failed to make use of the trademark within a five-year window, as required by Brazilian trademark law. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Apple Defends Proxy in Response to Greenlight Suit Unlike in the U.S., Brazilian trademark regulations stipulate that registrations be rewarded on a first-come, first-served basis, regardless of which party used the trademark first, or which party brings more value and recognition to the brand.

The company, according to the Journal, only utilized its “iphone” power a few weeks before the deadline for when it was required to actually use it to keep the trademark. They used it to put out a device running Android, called the “iphone neo one”. Here’s a look:

Apple released its iPhone 5 in Brazil in December.

Google regularly celebrates Carnaval from Feb 7-12. For the third year in a row, YouTube is streaming events. In a post on February 4, Google wrote:

What better way to experience a party the size of Brazil than by connecting to the rhythms and local traditions of six different cities—from Rio de Janeiro’s samba and Salvador’s axé to southern Brazil’s frevo. This year, you’ll be able to enjoy the festivities of Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Olinda, São Luís do Maranhão, Ouro Preto and Pirenópolis.

Pick from a series of live feeds, camera angles and performances from the city of your choice, right in the middle of the party. Channel feeds are made possible by a combination of YouTube Live and Google+ Hangouts. In total, you can access a total of 150 hours of live Carnival feeds—from your laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Google has also joined with photographers to upload pictures of “Carnaval’s best moments” from 20 different Brazillian cities at Google+ Carnaval.

According to a report from Reuters, Twitter is planning on opening up an office in Brazil’s biggest city, Sao Paulo.

“We believe our new office in Brazil will allow us to get closer to the users and show the value of our platform,” the company’s new country manager for Brazil, Guilherme Ribenboim, told Reuters. “Brazil has rather mature Internet and advertisement markets. Our audience is very big and active. We are going to try to monetize it.”

Twitter isn’t lying about their audience being big. Brazil is the social site’s second-biggest market in terms of total accounts and fifth when it comes to usage stats. The only other country with more Twitter accounts that Brazil is the United States.

Ribenboim is already talking about why Brazil presents such a good opportunity for Twitter. Not only will the move put them closer to one of their largest user bases, but upcoming world events like the World Cup (2014) and the Summer Olympics (2016) are taking place in Brazil.

And we know how popular Twitter can be during these sort of global events.

“It is already happening. We are talking (to advertisers) looking for opportunities, strategies,” said Ribenboim.

Brazil has seen Facebook use surge over the past year, and Google+ has also grown significantly in the country. Although Brazil is one of Twitter’s biggest locations, having operations there will make it easier for them to expand in the emerging market.

IGB Electronics SA announced this morning that the company will begin selling the IPHONE in Brazil as an entry level Android device. The first device to be sold under the IPHONE name is called the Gradiente Neo One. It runs on Android 2.3, and features dual-sim capabilities, 3G, Wi-Fi and bluetooth.

So, how is IGB able to sell a product called the IPHONE in Brazil while Apple currently sells the iPhone? The company had applied for the IPHONE name in 2000, and finally secured the rights in 2008 from a patent regulator. The company hasn’t used the name until now because its previous focus was getting through a restructuring period and getting back to selling products. Now it can focus on selling the IPHONE to consumers who may just want an iPhone.

Selling the phone to the less knowledgable should be pretty easy as well. The IPHONE will be sold at a ridiculously low price of 600 reais, or $286 USD. The iPhone 5 sells at 2,400 reais, or $1145 USD.

It should be pretty easy to tell the difference between the IGB’s IPHONE and Apple’s iPhone though. That being said, Apple is fiercely protective of its trademarks and will most likely file a lawsuit against IGB by the end of the week. For its part, IGB knows a lawsuit is likely coming and says that it will “adopt all measures” to preserve its right to the IPHONE name.

If it does end up going to court, it will be interesting to see what the Brazilian courts say. Is IPHONE different enough from iPhone? Is IGB’s trademark application legitimate? In any case, it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

[h/t: Macworld Brazil]

Starting today, amazon.com.br is the new home to 1.4 million Kindle books priced in Reals. Of these 1.4 million titles, Amazon says that over 13,000 of them are in Portuguese.

Amazon is also bringing free Portuguese Kindle Reading Apps to the country, as well as opening up Kindle Direct Publishing for Brazilian independent authors to get their work published worldwide.

It’s important to note that as of now, the Kindle Store is the only Amazon operation that the company is taking to Brazil – no physical sales. Reuters previously reported on the reason for this type of launch, saying that “the all-digital approach will allow Amazon to minimize the risks that a bigger retail launch would imply in a country with notorious infrastructure shortcomings and a complex, costly tax system.”

Basically, Amazon is trying to not bite off more than they can chew in Brazil at the time, and an ebook-only launch seems like the way to do it.

So, Brazilians can now download Kindle books for their Android and iOS devices, as well as their Macs and PCs. And coming soon, the latest Kindle device will make its way into the country:

“We are excited to launch this new Kindle Store for Brazilian customers, offering the most popular best-selling books from many great Brazilian authors, all priced in Reais,” said Alexandre Szapiro, Vice President of Kindle, Amazon.com.br. “We’re also bringing our latest generation Kindle—the best-selling e-reader in the world—to Brazilian customers at a suggested retail price of R$299 in the coming weeks. With the launch of free Kindle reading apps in Portuguese, anyone who has an Android phone, Android tablet, iPhone or iPad, PC or Mac, can start reading Kindle books today.”

Now, those pranksters are back with an even more terrifying elevator prank. This time, unsuspecting riders are shocked by a reanimated corpse. Yeah, it’s pretty brutal. Remind me to never ride an elevator in Brazil. Ever.

We’ve discussed this situation numerous times, but Frédéric Filloux, GM for digital operations at Les Echos Groupe and based in Paris, has put out an interesting article looking at how traditional media fits into the Google equation, and the data he shares doesn’t make it seem like Google would miss these publishers too much.

He looks at Google Trends data to look at the most searched terms in the U.S., France and Germany.

“Except for large dominant American news topics (‘Hurricane Sandy’ or ‘presidential debate’), very few search results bring back contents coming from mainstream media,” he points out. “As Google rewards freshness of contents — as well as sharp SEO tactics — ‘web native’ media and specialized web sites perform much better than their elder ‘migrants’, that is web versions of traditional media.”

He then brings up monetization, and how media contents contribute to Google’ bottom line. He looks at the most expensive keywords, which include things like: insurance, loans, mortgage, attorney, credit, lawyer, donate, degree, hosting, claim, conference call, trading, software, recovery, transfer, gas/electricity, classes, rehab, treatment and cord blood.

“By construction, traditional media do not bring money to the classification above,” writes Filloux. “In addition, as an insider said to me this week, no one is putting ads against keywords such as ‘war in Syria’ or against the 3.2 billion results of a ‘Hurricane Sandy’ query. Indeed, in the curve of ad words value, news slides to the long tail.”

He talks about all that Google has done and continues to do to deliver results to users for various types of search itself (as in not having to send users to other sites), such as shopping, flight search, etc., the Knowledge Graph, and concludes that as far as Google is concerned, having newspaper articles is just “small cool stuff”.

In other words, Google can get by just fine relying more on “web native” media, if traditional media publications want to pull themselves out of the mix.

This all comes at a time, mind you, when social media is playing an enormous role in breaking news (look simply to Twitter and Instagram’s roles in Hurricane Sandy news last week). Google has a whole other issue to worry about on that front.

Losing any source, whether that be a newspaper or real-time access to tweets, does set Google back in its stated mission – to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, but it’s looking less and less likely that Google will ever truly be able to accomplish that mission. Not only would this require cooperation from competitors, Google also faces potential regulation from various governments.

As far as the traditional media, if Brazil is any indication, they may be in no worse shape without Google. The publishers that pulled out don’t seem to be missing the Google referrals too much, even if their traffic is a bit lower. On the other hand, that is a country where Google News has been deemed “irrelevant”.

Should Google have to pay to link to content in Google News? Tell us what you think.

The battle continues in Europe. This week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt met with French President François Hollande, who according to a report from Bloomberg BusinessWeek (in an article that I did not find by using Google News), “demanded Google reach a deal with publishers”.

Google responded to the French point of view even before Schmidt’s meeting. Here’s what the company said in a blog post a couple weeks ago:

The web has led to an explosion of content creation, by both professional and citizen journalists. So it’s not a secret that we think a law like the one proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the internet. We have said so publicly for three years.

Google’s point about the “explosion of content creation” is very valid. Google has been pretty consistent in that it will not pay publishers to link to their content in search results. The question is whether Google users will noticeably suffer if Google stops including content from certain publishers.

This is currently being put to the test in Brazil, where 90% of the country’s newspaper circulation has pulled its content out of Google News. The publishers seem to be getting by fine without Google News (they haven’t pulled out of Google Web Search). The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported that these publishers have only seen a decrease in web traffic of 5%. Isabela Fraga and Natalia Mazotte report:

“The (newspapers) themselves believed that the 5-percent loss was a price worth paying to defend our authors’ rights and our brands,” said Ricardo Pedreira, ANJ’s executive director in a phone interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

“It’s important to point out,” he added, “that the portals of some news companies are still (in Google News).”

That doesn’t mean, however that publications everywhere could get by as well without Google News. The Bloomberg article quotes Ricardo Pedreira, executive director of Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, as saying, “Every country has a specific reality, and I think there will probably evolve different models in each nation.”

Google is already facing turbulence in Germany and Italy, in addition to France, so we may very well see publications pulling out of Google News in these countries as Google refuses to pay. Google has made the point in the past, that without said publications, users would be able to find information from other sources.

In September, Google revealed that Google News is currently available in 72 editions in 30 languages, and counts 50,000 publications among its news sources.

“Linking to a diverse set of sources for any given story enabled readers to easily access different perspectives and genres of content,” Google said recounting the product’s history. “By featuring opposing viewpoints in the same display block, people were encouraged to hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective.”

If publishers pull out, they face having their viewpoint lost from users’ view. However, that certainly does not mean that they will not be able to reach audiences via different means, thanks in some part to that explosion of content Google refers to.

Social media has rapidly emerged as a major source of news consumption in recent years. People don’t have to rely on Google News (or search in general) as much as they might have in the past. People have news driven to them via Facebook, Twitter, and numerous other channels all day, every day, right to the phones in their pockets.

In a recent article, I made the case that Google is even risking pushing more news seekers to Twitter specifically thanks to its lack of real time search. Twitter is the place to go if you want to find up to the second updates about anything, like say, a hurricane.

While Google has certainly offered some valuable resources related to Hurricane Sandy, it wasn’t Google that all of the journalism articles were talking about over the past week, with regards to how the news was coming out. There was a lot more talk about Twitter and Instagram (pictures from which were often surfaced via Twitter).

Sure, Google News has continued to serve its general purpose, but the news, as it often does, was breaking on Twitter. Google’s right. There’s an explosion of content, and that’s not going to change. People will find ways to get their news with or without publications in Google News (many of these same publications will be easily found via social media).

So who needs who more? Google or publishers? Google will want to make sure it has enough quality sources in its results, but it is unlikely that they will have to pay many publishers to do so, because thousands simply want to be discoverable in Google, and are happy to be there without demanding fees. Google does have an agreement with the AP for hosted content, and it’s possible that Google could look to plug any potential holes with similar arrangements, but it’s unlikely that Google will submit to such deals with a sizable number of publications. They simply don’t need all of that content that badly. Do they?

Well, I would say no they don’t, to be a useful service. Readers can get by without a lot of the sources currently in Google News. But, on the other hand, losing a significant amount of publications would also be a continued failure at Google’s mission, which is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. It seems that this mission is not worth paying publishers as far as Google is concerned.

What would you do if Google News lost 90% of newspaper publications in your country? Would you miss them? How would you consume your news? How do you consume it now? Let us know in the comments.

A new report from Quartz says that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is traveling to Paris next week “to discuss the issue”. The publication spoke with France’s minister of technology Fleur Pellerin:

“We don’t want to appear as a country that is anti-Google,” Pellerin told me in Boston today. “Obviously Google is a wonderful tool and Google is a major actor of the digital ecosystem.”

“What I would suggest—and what I’m going to suggest to Google and to the press–is to start negotiating, to start discussions for maybe three months, and try to find an agreement on a negotiated basis,” Pellerin continued. “And if they don’t, well we’ll see.”

Meanwhile, in Brazil, the publishers who have pulled out of Google News seem to be getting by just fine without it. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, which originally reported on the issue, is now reporting that these publishers have only seen a decrease in web traffic of 5%. Isabela Fraga and Natalia Mazotte report:

“The (newspapers) themselves believed that the 5-percent loss was a price worth paying to defend our authors’ rights and our brands,” said Ricardo Pedreira, ANJ’s executive director in a phone interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

“It’s important to point out,” he added, “that the portals of some news companies are still (in Google News).”

Irrelevant. Ouch.

It will be interesting to see if this influences publishers in other parts of the world, and if so, how much that really hurts Google, which always has thousands more sources and an entire blogosphere at its disposal, not to mention YouTube and Google+.

Coelho had a pretty personal stake in the drama that played out over the last few days. Earlier this week, a Brazilian judge ordered his arrest after Google failed to removed the videos, which the court claimed defamed a local mayoral candidate dring election season. Originally, Google held that they were not responsible for the content of the videos posted to YouTube, saying:

“Google is appealing the court’s decision to remove a video from YouTube because, as a platform, we are not responsible for the content uploaded to our site.”

But those appeals hit a roadblock, and Google has decided to block the “offending” videos.

Coelho has posted a lengthy statement on the decision, in which he speaks regretfully on the decision.

“Late last night, we learned that our final legal appeal has been denied and so now we have no choice but to block the video in Brazil. We are deeply disappointed that we have never had the full opportunity to argue in court that these were legitimate free speech videos and should remain available in Brazil,” he says.

Here’s the full statement:

You may have read articles in the press over the last couple of weeks about YouTube videos in Brazil. Given all the interest, we wanted to explain what has happened, and why. First of all some basic principles about the service. Our goal is for YouTube to be a community that everyone can enjoy, as well as a platform for free speech around the world. This can cause real challenges, because what is OK in one country may be offensive or even illegal in another.

So we have clear community guidelines about the kind of videos that are unacceptable–and when they are flagged, we review and if necessary remove them. If a video is illegal in a particular country–and we have a local version of the service there, as in Brazil–we will restrict access to it, after receiving a valid court order or government complaint. Because we are deeply committed to free expression, we often push back on requests that we do not believe are valid. For example, we were recently in court in the US arguing that videos were perfectly legitimate and should stay on YouTube.

Now for what’s happened in Brazil. As usual during an election season, we have had a lot of court orders to remove videos that are critical of political candidates. As always, we have reviewed them all– and pushed back on the many legal complaints that we believe are invalid. For example, last week, we appealed a court order to remove videos from YouTube. While we were waiting for that appeal to be heard, an arrest warrant was issued for me as country director of Google Brazil.

Late last night, we learned that our final legal appeal has been denied and so now we have no choice but to block the video in Brazil. We are deeply disappointed that we have never had the full opportunity to argue in court that these were legitimate free speech videos and should remain available in Brazil.

Despite all this, we will continue to campaign for free expression globally—not just because it’s a key tenet of free societies, but also because more information generally means more choice, more power, more economic opportunity and more freedom for people. As Article 19 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Ironically, the user who published one of the videos has now removed it and closed their account– showing just what a chilling effect these episodes can have on free speech.

Sadly, I guess we have to score one for censorship. Bad on you, Brazil.