Tag: Youtube ban

By Cade Metz in San Francisco

Update Google has reinstated the Atatürk-insulting videos that caused the Turkey’s 30-month YouTube ban, setting up yet another run-in with local authorities just days after a Turkish court lifted the ban.

Late last week, at the request of the semi-independent Turkish Internet Board, a German company used Google’s automatic copyright protection system to have the four videos taken down. On Saturday, a court lifted the ban on YouTube, pointing out that the videos were no longer available. But Google now says it has reinstated the videos because they did not violate copyrights.

“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,” reads a statement Google sent to The Reg.

The head of the country’s Telecommunications Transmission Directorate told The Wall Street Journal he would meet with Google “in the coming days.” The head of the Internet Board said that if Google’s statement about the videos was true “it would make it more difficult for our board to defend YouTube”, and that the ban may be put back in place.

Until this past weekend, Turkish authorities had continuously blocked access to YouTube since May 2008, after users uploaded videos that insulted the Turkish republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The government previously banned the site on at least three other occasions.

Apparently, the first ban – laid down in 2007 – was a response to a parody news broadcast in which Greek football fans taunted the Turks by saying: “Today’s news; Kemal Atatürk was gay!”

Under Turkish law — Law 5651 — the courts can shut down a website if it attacks Atatürk or incites suicide, paedophilia, drug usage, obscenity, or prostitution. The original video was removed, but prosecutors have since objected to various other videos insulting Atatürk, including the four that were just reposted by Google.

Turkish president Abdullah Gül has used Twitter to criticise the country’s YouTube ban. “About Turkey’s YouTube prohibition: I don’t approve of the state’s blocking of Google categories. Legal channels can be found,” he tweeted.

The ban has been a stumbling block in the country’s efforts to join the European Union. ®

Updated: This story has been updated with additional info supplied by Google.

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.

As we have mentioned before, Turkey has some problems with censorship. Between its governmental and religious authorities, it has shut down, and kept down, everything from YouTube to Blogger and a lot of what came in between.

In the past year, Turks have taken to the street to protest this censorship. And now, the YouTube ban has been lifted.

The ban, which was in effect since 2007, was lifted today. It was originally banned because the company would not delete certain videos, including some that ridiculed the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk. So, a judge ruled that the entire site be banned, one of the frequent fruit of blocking and filtering regimes.

Turkey’s professional and information class felt the bite. Turkey is a forward-looking, mercantile country. The block was both a liability – as information was off limits – and an embarrassment. Even the country’s president, Abdullah Gul, registered his displeasure – via Twitter.

However, the reason the ban was lifted was not a sudden spasm of right-thinking. It was because an unnamed German company enabled the objected video’s take-down, creating a dreadful precedent. (A Wall Street Journal article presents a different, and less plausible, scenario.) According to CNN:

“Government agencies were finally able to clear the deadlock last weekend when a company in Germany intervened by claiming copyrights to the controversial videos and removing them from the website.”

Is this for real? Or was it a face-saving workaround? YouTube’s owner, Google, found the copyright claim to be false and has reinstated the videos, though they are still blocked in Turkey. Either way, it is a terrible precedent and leaves Turkey as hamstrung by online censorship as it ever was.

via Turkey Unblocks YouTube After Face-Saving Copyright Claim.

After a two year YouTube blackout, officials in Turkey today lifted their ban on the world’s most popular video sharing website.

Bans originally started in March 2007 when videos showed up on the website with offensive comments made against Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. After a short period the site was unblocked only to repeat the block/unblock cycle for just over one year, until in May 2008 YouTube was completely blocked in the country.

The recent whitelisting of the site according to Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim occurred because:

“…We didn’t get here easily, we have been through a lot in the process. I hope that they have also learned from this experience and the same thing will not happen again. YouTube will hopefully carry out its organization in Turkey within the limits of law in the future.”

While it’s a positive step for individuals wanting to browse the site in the country, YouTube says they had absolutely nothing to do with the videos being removed. In a statement released to the public YouTube said:

“We want to be clear that a third party, not YouTube, [has] apparently removed some of the videos that have caused the blocking of YouTube in Turkey using our automated copyright complaint process. We are investigating whether this action is valid in accordance with our copyright policy.”

via Turkey Unblocks YouTube For First Time In Years | The Blog Herald.