Slashdot Mirror
Turkey Bans Google's Blogger Over Soccer Piracy
An anonymous reader writes "A local court has banned Google's Blogger service in Turkey in response to a complaint by satellite TV firm Digiturk that streaming media feeds from local soccer games were appearing on multiple Blogger profiles. Unsurprisingly, Google criticized the move, given that everyone is suffering over a few people's illegal actions. Copyright holders should target the individuals that are distributing the infringing content via an established complaints procedure rather than having the parent site banned. An estimated 600,000 Turks use the service to blog about anything from daily ramblings, to hobbies, to keeping their readers updated with the news."
So, does anybody know:
Is the Turkish government merely twitchy about precious, precious "IP", or is this somewhat more like China, where external web services get blocked more or less at random in no small part because the government wishes to encourage use of some local competitor?
If the former, this seems like it could be counterproductive: beyond any considerations of "justice" or "proportionality", the (cynical, pragmatic) justification for targeted enforcement is that it keeps average-joe-on-the-street on your side, rather than making him side with whatever malefactors you are cracking down on. Upsetting 600,000 people(and encouraging them to learn about proxies and such) is a questionable move.
If the latter, the plot gets a bit thicker...
There. I said it. The USA DMCA is not entirely evil.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Local Courts, apparently. Or better yet, how about just banning local dumbshit judges that are still stuck in 1947 or whatever the hell yesteryear they graduated from law school in?
Otherwise your local employees may find themselves detained by police and questioned. Vigorously.
There. I said it. The USA DMCA is not entirely evil.
And Stalin made the trains run on time. So what? Simply because something has a redeeming quality or two doesn't grant it a reprieve.
This all sounds fishy. Blogger has no mechanism to host streaming media. It integrates well with youtube and picasa, but neither of those could show you live games, both respond to takedown notices, and neither was targeted by this.
Our local courts and judges are very ignorant about cumputer and internet releated stuff and our laws are very very flexible about cencorship. You can close about any site with those. Bad thing is, all of those streaming blogs are getting it from justin.tv and embed it to their blogs. And they're closing blogger, not justin.tv. They are that stupid. It doesn't matter though. Everybody knows how to change their dns settings, or to use proxy. We memorized it when youtube closed for 3 years.
I still looove their taffy!
We are no longer friends. ;)
For better or worse, Blogger is a US company. Had they sent it a DMCA notice, it would have been upheld. Of course, it's always easier to censor stuff when you have something like COICA already in place!
It be haaard to be playin' ye olde soccerrrrrrr on account o' me wooden leg an' eyepatch an' the goalie be keepin' bustin' the ball wi' 'is hook me hearties!
Please, do not take this as personal freedoms, censorship etc problem.
This is the how Turkish law system works...
Some one use internet for piracy.
Piracy victim goes court and court assigns an expert. Expert suggest something, court agrees and bans the sites.
And Turkish telecom uses own dns based banning system...
Then people uses Google dns servers to access those banned hosts.
It was very frustrating thing for a western mind...
for us, it just another day to find the another way to jump other side of the fence...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
As you remember from the slashdot articles of the time, there is an internet censorship board which is directly tied to the prime minister, and which is also able to censor websites without any court order, if they are deemed 'dangerous or harmful' for the culture or 'youth'. the ruling party's own president's office had detected that 6,000 websites or so were censored totally without court order, despite the claims of the censorship board to not have censored anything without a court order.
and then there is the court order invoked censorships or takedowns. these vary 50/50 in between copyright issues and political censorship.
on top of this, there are other kinds of repression of the media even outside internet. recently, almost all of the remaining journalists who oppose the current government were rounded up in a 'terror trial' that's ongoing (and neverending) in the country. it invoked reaction of eu, and u.s. that also hit internet too - a prominent and rather significant opposition media outlet's journalists were broadcasting primarily from their website. they had been rather too effective. and they are now under custody under charges which eu and u.s. (finally) thinks to be rather dubious and unfounded.
so basically - there is huge censorship in turkey. in order to appease eu, the government is trying to make it appear as if there is no censorship and whatever is happening, is happening legitimately and through courts, but somehow, ALL these court issues happen to hit opposing journalists or political opponents. and moreover, they hit when they become rather too vocal too - if you keep your voice down, you are tolerated for some time. if you are talking and people are hearing, suddenly you get taken in for a 'terror investigation'.
such is the state of turkey. it has no place in european union at this state. its really a total facade of a democracy.
Read radical news here
Due to CNAME record (which pointing to ghs.l.google.com), rss.slashdot.org is unaccessible in Turkey. I can't even read slashdot rss feed in this damn country. This is how government work on www in Turkey.
Is this what you want?
I am not saying filtering content is good, censorship is not acceptable in any case.
I'm against non-sense censorship as well. But I wish in this kind of situation, *all* Google products to be blocked (including Google Search Engine), if Google does not change its arrogant behavior. This is not censorship in a known sense. Once they would see that they will lose such a market and other sites would stop using Google for their services, they would do their auto-control more efficient. I don't understand, how someone do accept idea of a company to have its own 'laws' in your own country just because of some convenience they get from said company? I can't vote for Google BoDs since I'm not a shareholder, but I can vote for my representatives. Why should I give control to them? They are just a company, and for almost all of their products, there are alternatives. (I'm happy to get inferior quality for the sake of my freedom).
I mean, come on. Who would pirate soccer.
that doesn't have to do with islam. Only judges are idiot
The Turkish Government takes the law very seriously, and I believe this particular case is a consequence of applying a law that was intended for a smaller website (or a newspaper) to something as large as Google.
The earlier YouTube ban, on the other hand, was perceived by some part of the populace as "teaching Google a lesson" for allowing content offensive to Turkish culture.
I believe this is a _very_ good example of what happens when you allow any government the ability to block anything on the Internet. Politicians don't necessarily understand technology.
given that everyone is suffering over a few people's illegal actions
Sounds more like everyone is suffering over a local court's clumsy trampling of free speech in order to protect the profits of some broadcast monopoly-holders.
Australia is working on a filter to block "Unwanted Content" (Yes, that's what our government calls it) and the United States is looking at having the ability to kill the internet should it threaten the ruling government.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
This would be the same Turkey whose president is so fucking stupid that he tweets about the joys of watching a pirated movie in the comfort of his own home?
because i'm the founder of www.LiveChatConcepts.com which features 14 websites around live sporting events such as http://www.livebaseballchat.com/ http://www.livefootballchat.com/ http://www.livehockeychat.com/ http://www.livebasketballchat.com/ etc etc - i see a lot of these sites streaming media (we dont stream any media, just provide chats that start and close with each event) I can understand why IP owners are trying to get them shut down as they pay a lot for the rights to stream football/basketball/soccer etc. When people use blogger/justin.tv etc as a tool to bypass these PPV's you have to understand that is moeny being taken out of their pocket. You might say well the NFL makes 9b a year thats plenty, maybe but my neighbour works for a stadium and if you dont pay...he doesnt get paid if you know what i mean. So whilst it's easy to poke fun of the courts going after blogger (though not sure why they didnt go after justin.tv etc is beyond me) the point is what should they be doing to recoup their money? Any Thoughts?
Digiturk's lawyers told that they tried to make Google close only the blogs with pirated content but Google didn't do this. And it's a case going on for over a year between Digiturk and Google. So Turkish courts ban IP's but since blogs on blogger.com use IP's from an IP pool many blogs are effected. I only wanted to give opposite arguments which I personally didn't find convincing.
go to microsoft if you think they are better
and you please go to another site, if you think you know how to read.
In an upper view, well actually it is not about laws, rights etc. In this country it is not first that Google's IPs were blocked. As you may remember Youtube was blocked for years, for the very first reason, about digiturk copyrights bla bla.
These are all about political view, scientific vision and mission of our dear government and the cabinet. They are really very far from science and technology.