Turkey bans Blogger due to a handful of blogs linking to pirated football games

Turkey has completely blocked Google’s blogging service Blogger due to a handful of sites linking to pirated football (soccer) games. The ban took place Friday and blocks the entire service, not just infringing blogs.

The court ruling (censorship in Turkey is decided in the courts…mostly) followed a complaint from Digitürk TV, a subscription based digital TV platform that owns the right to transmit live coverage of Turkish football league games. Digitürk had asked Google to remove blogs that linked to pirated streams of their coverage (notably only linked, but were not hosting the content.) Google didn’t take the sites down, so Digitürk obtained a blocking order through a court in Diyarbakir for the two domains and their IP addresses, which in the case of Blogger are shared so now the entire service is blocked in the country.

Under Turkish copyright law, blocking is allowed where sites link to copyright material, where usually in western nations, a link may not necessarily constitute an offense in itself. Digitürk has previously been successful in having Justin.tv and MyP2P TV blocked in Turkey.

(via basbasbas and cyber-rights)