Turkish YouTube Un-Ban May Be Short-Lived as Offending Videos Go Back Up

A 30-month ban on YouTube in Turkey was lifted on Saturday. Users can now visit the site freely again, but this may not last as the videos which were the source of the ban have now been restored by YouTube, after being taken down last week following a copyright infringement complaint.

Turkey banned the site after a number of videos insulting the country's modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - a crime in Turkey - landed on the site.

However, the videos were taken down last week so a Turkish court decided the ban could be lifted. Google, however, said that it had nothing to do with the removal of the videos.

It turns out that the videos in question were taken down automatically after a group of "volunteers" filed a copyright infringement complaint.

YouTube's Content ID software, which has been setup to handle copyright claims and automatically discover infringing content, takes offline any videos that others claim to be infringing.

This is done regardless if the claim is valid or not and it's up to the original uploader to dispute the copyright claim. Until this happens, though, the video stays offline.

This mechanism, which is not unique to YouTube yet falls outside of US copyright law requirements, has been abused plenty of times to stifle free speech or to pull down, even if temporarily, videos some don't approve of.

There may have been some validity to the copyright claim since images used in the videos were taken from Turkish archives. However, YouTube has now decided that the images in question fall under the "fair use" doctrine of the US DMCA, as satire, and thus are exempt from copyright claims under US law.

As such, YouTube has now reinstated the videos worldwide. The videos, however, remain unavailable inside Turkish borders as has always been the case. YouTube, like Google for that matter, generally tries to follow the laws of the country it's serving the content to.

It has blocked the videos in Turkey ever since the country objected to them, but it has refused to take them down for the rest of the world as well, which is what authorities in Turkey are trying to do, for fear of creating an ugly precedent where the laws of one country are being applied to everyone else.

For now, it seems that YouTube access is still unrestricted in Turkey, but it may only be a matter of time before the site gets banned again. Turkish authorities say they won't act until they have an official confirmation from YouTube that the videos have indeed been re-posted.