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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."
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?
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.
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.
They're not streaming through blogger. They just embed the code from justin.tv. But they're closing blogger anyway out of stupidity.
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.