Apple was ordered to pay 12 million yuan (US$1.9 million) to a Chinese online publisher in an initial ruling handed down by the Tianjin Binhai People’s Court on Monday, months after the country’s highest court decided against the US technology giant in another lawsuit. That ruling in favour of the Tianjin subsidiary of COL Digital Publishing Group, which has been locked in a legal battle with Apple for a decade, found that several unnamed apps on the US firm’s online App Store in mainland China published unlicensed content, including popular novels, that can only be distributed by the online publisher,…