Just last week, Yahoo has further sweetened the deal by concentrating on what users want in an e-mail experience, offering up a new, revamped Yahoo Mail with a considerably sleeker interface.

On the Web platform, Yahoo has cut down on the clutter and reduced the number of buttons on the page, making it intuitive as well as easier to navigate. It has to buck up because Google and Gmail have become the default tool for many users of Android, the most popular smartphone operating system now.

The new, sleek Yahoo Mail Web interface

According to Vivek Sharma, general manager of Yahoo Mail and Messenger, the new Yahoo Mail offers 40 per cent faster access from the logon screen to inbox while composing messages is now 10 to 15 per cent faster than before.

For phones, Yahoo has launched new, native apps for the iPhone/iPod touch and Windows 8, as well as upgraded the Yahoo Mail app for Android. A simple swipe allows users to quickly star important messages, file e-mails to folders and mark e-mails as spam from the inbox. Best of all, the user interface across all the platforms is consistent, ensuring that users can have the same experience regardless of the device they access Yahoo Mail from.

Yahoo Mail interface on Android 

More information on the new Yahoo Mail can be found in Sharma’s blog post here as well as in this post by Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO.

In a statement to the stock exchange hours ago, SPH said the United States Internet company had plagiarised its articles by “substantially reproducing the words and expressions used in SPH’s articles without permission”. 

SPH alleged that Yahoo! had reproduced ”identical paragraphs, sentences, phrases and/or words of SPH’s articles and the paraphrasing of sentences, phrases and/or words in SPH’s articles by merely replacing them with synonyms”.

The Singapore publisher also said that it could bring up more evidence of further copyright infringements, beyond the 23 instances it had raised earlier, after it filed its defence in the High Court on Wednesday to a Yahoo! counter-suit.

The legal dispute first broke out in November, when SPH sued Yahoo’s Southeast Asia outfit and claimed that the online group had reproduced 23 of its newspaper articles without permission. Yahoo! swiftly denied this and counter-sued SPH for copyright infringement, alleging that SPH’s Stomp citizen journalism site had infringed on its copyright on at least two occasions.

To this, SPH claimed on Wednesday that Yahoo! had only acquired the copyright to the content a day before it counter-sued, and thus did not own the content when they were first posted by third parties on the SPH site.

As the two media giants lock horns, the tussle is being closely watched as the first such challenge between old and new media here.

The dispute is also played out against a backdrop of increasingly tight competition for Internet “eyeballs”, as more of Singapore’s well-connected news consumers head online for the latest breaking stories and commentaries.

Yahoo! has since denied the claims, with managing editor for Southeast Asia Alan Soon saying yesterday that the company intends to “vigorously” defend itself and that its editorial business model is proven.

The case pits the old against the new. In one corner is SPH, one of the most profitable media companies in the world that publishes a 166-year-old newspaper called The Straits Times; in the other, Yahoo is a “grandfather” of dot.coms but still a relatively young company when it comes to media and content.

More importantly, it highlights the increasingly tough competition facing the online content business in Singapore, especially as established media giants like SPH, which just reported S$1.25 billion in revenues, seek to defend their turf against “over-the-top” or online challengers with leaner operations.

In the past year, Yahoo! Southeast Asia has been publishing stories that often cite articles that have first appeared in SPH newspapers, from The Straits Times to Chinese dailies like Lianhe Wanbao.

By reporting what has been published in the dailies, Yahoo! does not have to employ the same amount of journalists as the hundreds in the newspool that SPH does to cover the news in Singapore. Despite being slightly late to the news, Yahoo! keeps costs low by not having as many roving reporters pounding the streets.

Yahoo! still creates original stories, but often, it can avoid one of the most expensive costs of running a news operation and still get lots of eyeballs for its stories on, say, the Singapore general elections or the bodies found at Bedok Reservoir, by reporting on what its writers have read in SPH newspapers.

This means Internet users can read stories on Singapore without having to fork out money for them on the paid version of The Straits Times website, which offers full stories instead of the snippets that appear on SPH’s free site.

This, however, takes away traffic from SPH sites as well as readers from SPH newspapers. By diverting paying readers away, Yahoo! is a direct challenger to the SPH business model.

Readership in SPH newspapers has been falling for the past two years, and even if this is not as bad as what is happening to counterparts in the the United States, the slight decline is set against a fast-increasing population in Singapore that includes the import of skilled, literate migrants to the country in the past 10 years (read SPH’s 2011 annual report here).

As media consultant and former newspaper editor P N Balji put it in a Yahoo! news story, the drop in readership, if not arrested, could impact advertising revenues for SPH.

To be sure, there is nothing illegal about reporting on what is already in the newspapers. Indeed, if you follow the news on most online sites today, you’d see that the reputable ones often do cite their sources, especially when it comes to news articles that originate from other news outlets.

The question now is in the 23 articles that SPH alleges that Yahoo! had “reproduced substantially” without permission. The Singapore publisher is asking the High Court to stop Yahoo! from further reproducing its articles and pay damages for infringement.

While the case is ongoing, it would not be fair to comment on the claims. But when it goes to court, this could be one of the first such cases of old versus new media, and possibly a landmark one for years to come.

Disclosure: The writer is an SPH shareholder and occasionally contributes articles to The Straits Times. Techgoondu is a content partner of Yahoo! Southeast Asia.