HUA HIN, Thailand - The battle between Google's video-sharing YouTube website and the Turkish authorities raged on this week when the country blocked the service only days after releasing it from a two-and-a-half-year blackout within Turkey's borders.
A Turkish court flipped the switch on the site following the republication of a number of old videos that it deemed insulting to the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
During the original ban, which was the result of a May 2008 court order, a Turkish group of self-described "volunteers" working closely with the government managed to get the clips removed by using Google's automated copyright infringement system. Noting
that the offensive material had been removed, the courts lifted the ban and Turks last weekend were able to use YouTube for the first time in over two years.
Google apparently did not agree with this and reinstated the videos, claiming that they were not copyright infringing, hence the reinforcement of the ban. Many observers claim that the group's actions in attempting to remove the clips were a precursor to censorship on a wider scale. Turkey's restrictive Internet laws have been responsible for the blocking of more than 5,000 websites within the country. However, its net-savvy population is quite adept at using proxy servers to circumnavigate government-imposed website outages.
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