Google Reposts Banned Turkish Videos

By MARC CHAMPION

ISTANBUL—Google Inc. on Monday appeared to be set for a renewed clash with Turkey’s government, when it reposted videos that a court had ruled insulting to the republic’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, effectively rejecting an attempt to end a ban on YouTube in Turkey.

The four videos, which have kept YouTube banned here since May 2008, were taken off the Web late last week by a Turkish group of self-described “volunteers,” working closely with the government. The group used Google’s automatic copyright protection system to have the clips removed.

Turks were able to access YouTube directly for the first time in more than two years last weekend, after a court on Saturday lifted the ban, noting that the offending clips were now gone. Google, however, said Monday it was restoring the videos, while critics described the volunteers’ copyright plan as an enabler for censorship.

“When we looked into this, we found the videos were not, in fact, copyright infringing, so we have put them back up, though they continue to be restricted within Turkey. We hope very much that our users in Turkey can continue to enjoy YouTube,” the company said in a statement. A spokesman declined comment further.

The head of Turkey’s Telecommunications Transmission Directorate, which is responsible for enforcing Internet bans, said he would meet with YouTube officials “in the coming days.” Serhat Ozeren, who heads the semi-independent Internet Board of Turkey, said in an interview that the YouTube statement was being treated as unofficial, but that if it proved correct “it would make it more difficult for our board to defend YouTube” and the ban could easily resume.

Turkish courts blocked access to YouTube in 2008 after Google refused to accept the demand that videos the court ruled illegal should be removed worldwide, and not just in Turkey, fearing the precedent it would set. Google officials appear to have been concerned that it would be seen as tacitly agreeing to that extraterritorial principle if they didn’t restore the videos.

YouTube is just one of thousands of websites that have been shut down in Turkey since the government passed a new Internet law in 2007, which enabled entire sites to be banned if any amount of material on them was found to infringe on a range of banned topics, from obscenity to insulting Atatürk. While the number of site closures in Turkey still grows, the YouTube ban in particular has become an embarrassment for the government, increasingly under attack for restricting media freedoms.

The offending videos were removed from YouTube.com after Turkey’s state television channel TRT and the nation’s parliament commissioned a little-known Turkish-owned company in Germany, International Licensing Service, to enforce their copyright claims, according to Levent Berber, part of a husband-and-wife team of lawyers who advised on the scheme.

Photographs of Atatürk used in the videos came from the two institutions’ archives.

Mr. Berber’s wife, Leyla Keser Berber, described herself and the two founders of ILS in a blog post as “volunteers” who had constructed a “warning-removals” system to help protect Turks from losing direct access to YouTube again in future. While formally banned, YouTube remains widely used in Turkey via proxy addresses.

“This should be good news for Google…they will be adding 70 million people to their account,” said Mr. Berber, adding that freedoms everywhere were subject to legal limitations. He said he could not understand how Google, as a service provider, could assume to judge the validity of a copyright claim.

Google’s automatic copyright enforcement system works by matching images provided by copyright owners to images put on YouTube by users. But the system has safeguards to prevent abuse. In this case, the doctored images appear to have fallen squarely under “fair use” exemptions to copyright laws, as they were a form of satire.

Melih Bayram Dede, technology editor for the daily Yeni Safak described the copyright enforcement plan as “extremely artificial and inadequate…that allows the state to “keep removing videos which it does not approve of, so we can say censorship continues.”

“As long as the law on crimes committed on the Internet…is not amended or removed, these kind of Internet bans will continue,” he said.

—Ayla Albayrak contributed to this article.

Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com

via Google Reposts Banned Turkish Videos – WSJ.com.