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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."
I don't know about their IP laws, but Turkey does have a somewhat strained relationship with political speech - it's theoretically well protected, and broadly speaking, dissenting opinions are published more or less freely, but it's not especially unusual for those espousing the opinions to end up in court over it.
It's actually a very good 'slippery slope' example for those of us in the west to point out - under the veil of copyright protection, speech is severely curtailed, and this in a country which can only just get away with it. This isn't something people can write off as "It won't happen here" like the gross abuses in Saudi Arabia or China, this is a very real threat to free speech even in countries where it's more strongly protected.
You seem to have missed the point - they didn't just block the alleged infringing content, the blocked the entire Google Blogger service; that's 600,000 people's speech blocked from view by the government because a few broke the law. I'd say that's very much a free speech issue, and your post is an excellent example of how their attempts to imply it's a simple copyright case are working.