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Tag: turkish football

  • Blogger/Blogspot unblocked in Turkey while court awaits missing evidence

    Right now, Blogger and *.blogspot.com domains are available again while courts await further evidence backing Digiturk’s claims. Great. Let’s hope it stays that way. After YouTube got unbanned, it got banned again, so who knows what will happen.

    The ban has been lifted by the Turkish court that previously blocked Blogger last Friday. They have requested “missing evidence” but made it clear that the ban could be reintroduced after the legal procedure is completed by the prosecutor.

    Digiturk, Turkish license holder for the broadcasts of Turkish football league games, asked for blogs with links to pirated streams to be removed. Blogger did not reply and Digiturk went to court, getting millions of innocent blogs blocked. The statement that “Blogger did not reply” makes me think all Digiturk did was send out an email – and as some of us know, if you email Google services, be prepared to wait two weeks. They should have called.

    The law that allows for the blocking of domain names still stands. Many popular sites are still blocked. Blogger can be blocked again. It’s not over, but at least Blogger’s available again. Yet still we can expect to see more of this:

    And the protest banner posted on Turkish (as well as international) blogs hosted at blogspot.com:

    Thanks to Hans for his useful tip!
    Thanks to the Istanbulian for further information.

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  • Digiturk causes Turkish ban of Blogger/Blogspot

    Since Friday, it’s been impossible to access popular blogging platform Blogger or any *.blogspot.com domain from a Turkish IP address, due to a ban imposed by a court in the south east of Turkey.

    Previously it was rumoured that Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, might have caused the new ban, since he successfully got WordPress and Google Groups banned in the past, as well as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ website. However, this rumour was refuted by someone pointing out that Oktar operated in Istanbul courts and the verdict banning Blogger was passed in Diyarbakır, at the other side of Turkey.

     

    Blogger's banned in Turkey screenshot 

    Click to enlarge.

    It’s now reported that it is not Oktar that got Blogger banned, but Digiturk, a subscription based digital TV platform that owns the rights to the live broadcasting of Turkish football league games. Apparently, Digiturk asked Blogger to take several blogs or blog entries down containing links to pirated transmissions of the live games. Blogger did nothing, Digiturk went to court and under Turkish intellectual property law, they managed to get Blogger banned completely, effectively banning millions of websites that have nothing to do with Turkish football or pirating.

    Digiturk’s court cases in the past have managed to block Justin.tv and MyP2P TV for the same reasons.

    Turkey’s NATO membership and EU ambitions seem paradoxical to the infringement on the freedom of press and speech of its citizens, residents and visitors by banning sites like Blogger and YouTube. The EU’s making a blacklist of censoring countries and are creating software for people in these countries to use to bypass the censorship (see: Global Online Freedom Act).

    Thanks to safak for his tip about Digiturk!

    Some useful links to unblock YouTube/Blogger (blogspot)/other blocked pages in Turkey:

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