14 DAY TRIAL // Google is having problems in Turkey again, Blogger has been blocked entirely in the country by a local court. The issue, this time, is with copyrighted content, streams of football matches showing up on various Blogger blogs. The solution, a local media company believed, was to block millions of blogs and millions of users, with the help of the court.
As Google notes, it does have a copyright infringement complaint process in pace, an overly aggressive one at that, so Digiturk, the company in question could have easily requested Blogger to take down the pirated content or even the entire blogs.
But that would have been way too much trouble for the company, a much easier solution was to sue Google and have a court block all access to Blogger.
There are 600,000 Turkish Blogger users alone and many millions of blogs in total. Now, all of them are inaccessible because a TV company didn't like that its football matches were being streamed online.
What's more, the actual streams can be viewed in countless other locations, so the block won't affect the ones looking for the pirate matches. But the vast majority of content on Blogger is not available anywhere else.
It's hardly a surprising move in Turkey though, a country which wants to joint the EU, where YouTube has been blocked for years over a few videos. The videos mocked the country's founder, Kemal Atatürk, which is prohibited by law in Turkey.
Since YouTube refused to remove the videos around the world and not just in Turkey like it had done, a court decided to block the entire site. YouTube was unblocked late last year, though there may be more issues yet.
Google is not pleased with the move, understandably, and is fighting it, but considering its past plights, it may take a while before service is restored.