Google’s Blogger banned in Turkey over soccer broadcast piracy

A Turkey court has issued a statewide ban on Google service Blogger, locking 600,000 Turkish bloggers out of their personal diaries.

The ban was imposed in response to a complaint from satellite TV company Digiturk. The company claimed that soccer matches it was broadcasting had been posted on Blogger.

Turkish copyright law allows the government to shut down or block an entire service, rather than simply seeking to have the infringing content removed.

Google said in a statement that it would have removed infringing content quickly had Digiturk used the processes put in place by Google, and that the move unnecessarily inconvenienced millions of Turkish citizens.

“Instead of depriving all content owners from accessing Blogger services, we encourage them to make use of such a process. In this way, Blogger users from Turkey will be able to benefit from the services while we try to deal with the complaint,” said a Google representative in a statement.