YouTube Ban/ Censorship

[piccolomondo]

YouTube Banned In Turkey
A YouTube broadcast that showed Greek soldiers marching and singing hateful lyrics such as “We will break off the Turks’ heads and plant a cross in Hagia Sophia,” as part of the commando unit’s routine bi-annual march has caused Turkey to completely block access to YouTube.

According to Turkish media, YouTube had become a battleground for a ‘virtual war’ between Greek and Turkish users of the site, with both groups posting insulting videos.

Accessing the video-sharing site from the country results in the following text (translated from Turkish):

Access to YouTube site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/ 384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court.

While the videos were removed from YouTube, the site still remains blocked.
Read more here and here.

[piccolomondo]

Turkey lifted its ban on YouTube Friday two days after a court ordered the Web site blocked because of videos that allegedly insulted the founder of modern Turkey.

Turkey Lifts YouTube Ban After Two Days

(AP) -- Turkey lifted its ban on YouTube Friday, an official for the country's largest telecommunications firm said, two days after a court ordered the Web site blocked because of videos that allegedly insulted the founder of modern Turkey.

Ahter Kutadgu, head of corporate communications for Turk Telekom, told the Anatolia news agency his company had been notified of a court decision to lift the ban.

Kutadgu did not elaborate on the court's reasoning. "As soon as the court decision lifting the ban reached us, we immediately opened YouTube," he said.

The Istanbul court that ordered the site blocked on Wednesday had said it would lift the ban as soon as it ascertained that videos insulting Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, were removed.

The ban had been condemned by the press freedom group Reporters without Borders and drew attention to Turkey's shaky record on permitting free expression.

It is illegal in Turkey to insult Ataturk, a revered figure whose image graces every denomination of currency and whose portrait hangs in nearly all government offices.

Several prominent Turkish journalists and writers have been tried for allegedly insulting Ataturk or for the crime of insulting "Turkishness."

[piccolomondo]

Google employees consult government officials on the most effective ways to block certain content.
Reuters writes:

YouTube will help Thailand block access to pages that contain clips offensive to its revered monarch instead of blacking out the whole site, a cabinet minister said on Friday.

Communications Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom told Reuters the idea came during a phone call with a California-based government liason officer of Google Inc, which owns YouTube.

The site had refused to pull out a clip insulting King Bhumibol Adulyadej, which led the military-backed government on Thursday to entirely block access to it.

“He said pulling out those clips would not be an effective way to stop the damage, since users could re-post them again,” said Sitthichai, referring to Google officer Andrew McLaughlin.

“He said a more effective way would be to block certain pages not to be seen in Thailand,” he said.

[Al-khiyal]

Whoever posted the video on YouTube ridiculing King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand knew what he or she was doing. In Thai culture and tradition, the king is genuinely revered, and the video insulted him in ways that could only invite national outrage and precisely the government reaction it got: Thailand banned access to YouTube.

This is not the first time Google's popular video-sharing service has been blocked from an entire society. Tehran blocked YouTube over, among other things, Borat, failing to find anything funny in Sacha Baron Cohen's portrayal of Iran's neighbor, Kazakhstan. In March a Turkish court ordered YouTube blocked for carrying material deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state. In January India contemplated similar action over a clip of a pole-dancing Mahatma Gandhi.

Whatever their reasons, governments worldwide are grappling with the influence and perceived dangers of a medium that is compelling, accessible, hip and wildly popular.

Alas, we are not talking just about YouTube here, but about the integrity of the Internet itself.

State initiatives to guard against pornography, bigotry, terrorism and anything that might damage the cultural fabric have consistently morphed into campaigns covering so much more, and have therefore run up against equally valid concern for free expression and access to information.

It is no longer just YouTube that is banned in Iran, for example. Wikipedia is also on the blacklist, as is Amazon.com. In Thailand, Internet censorship was becoming an issue even prior to the video of the king.

Thais are in general agreement that the controversial clip insulted the king. But what gives them pause about the wholesale blocking of YouTube is the awareness that it is not the first site to be rendered inaccessible in the kingdom, and it won't likely be the last.

Some observers suspect that, for reasons beyond the monarchy and the defense of Thai culture, YouTube was occasionally blocked as early as January and as recently as March, though in both instances the authorities denied doing anything.

Meanwhile, the recent blocking of political Web sites that the country's military rulers regard as too friendly to the deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra recall government clampdowns against online debates about the coup that toppled Thaksin in September.

On April 6, Article 19, the London-based organization monitoring legislation that limits free expression worldwide, warned the Thai public that the "Computer-Related Offenses Commission Act" being drafted by a 25-member legislative panel has "serious implications" for the Internet and for freedom of expression in Thailand.

Whenever online media are attacked or threatened, as in Thailand, governments insist that a defense of culture is unavoidable and should be understandable. Understandable is fair enough. But the oft-repeated objective is invalidated by oft-repeated experience. The stated mission of defending culture is elusive, if not deluded. For all their best intentions, those who seek to control content in cyberspace have a tendency to breed self-fulfilling fears.

The more you block, the more you invite cracks. The more you filter, the better people become at going around obstacles. And the more you ban, the more you create interest.

Governments say they at least have to try. Everybody else must simply make an effort to be sensitive to different cultures.

This, too, is a fair plea. It certainly does not help advocates of freedom of expression to have on their side drunks, boors and those who believe that the very suggestion that they need to be considerate is tantamount to padlocking their lips.

An equally important lesson, however, is that governments, too, must themselves understand the culture of the Internet and the global generation that can neither grow nor compete without access to it.

Governments that fail to understand the futility of efforts to block Internet access and put little faith in the public's ability to consume responsibly will only generate resentment and their own isolation in an age of inevitable, borderless flow of information.

You block YouTube at your peril

[Bent_Bladi]

I remember reading about a place - I completely forgot what it was called - but they had banned television for a long time. Then when they finally allowed it, people went crazy... gosh, I had a video too but i can't find it

[Bent_Bladi]

Oh my Allah!! It turns out I saved the lecture and the video links that were in it... The place is called Bhutan... and here's a link to the video:

FRONTLINE/WORLD . Bhutan - The Last Place . Index page | PBS

[Al-khiyal]

English football's Premier League is to sue the YouTube video clip sharing website for alleged copyright infringement, the BBC online reported on Saturday.

The league's lawsuit said that YouTube, which is owned by Google, had "knowingly misappropriated and exploited this valuable property" by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site, the BBC said.

Last October, the Premier League wrote to YouTube, asking it to take down online material which it said infringed the legal rights of its partners and clubs.

At the time, a spokesman said that they did not expect to take legal action. But according to the BBC, the Premier League has now launched a case in New York and is claiming unspecified damages.

In March, US media giant Viacom launched a billion dollar (736 million euro) lawsuit against YouTube, accusing it of illegally showing clips from its television shows.

YouTube denies these claims, the BBC reported.

English Premier League 'to sue YouTube'