January 2008
Law on Regulation of Internet Publishing and Struggle with Crimes Committed via Internet Publishing
The Law on Regulation of Internet Publishing and Struggle with Crimes Committed via Internet Publishing was enacted on 04.05.2007. The 1st Article of the Law provides that, the aim and the purpose of the Law is to regulate the liabilities and obligations of the content provider, domain provider, access provider, multithreading provider as well as fundamentals and procedure of the struggle with crimes committed by internet publishing through the means of content provider, domain provider and access provider.
Pursuant to the Article 3; together with the information giving obligation of content provider, domain provider and access provider, the mentioned providers are also obliged to provide actual information on themselves for user's access via internet, in the context of fundamentals and procedure provided by the related By-Law.
Here, it may be useful to give brief definitons of the acces provider, content provider and domain provider. Access provider is the system that connect people to the internet/wap. (for example, the major access providers for Turkey are TTNet, Superonline, Smile, Adsl, Turkcell, Vodafone internet services). Content provider is the owner of the internet/wap site, namely, it is the webmaster. And the domain provider is the person or datacenter or hostingfirm, through which internet/wap sites are broadcasting.
According to the Law; content provider shall be liable to indemnify all sorts of contents submitted by himself to the internet; on the other hand the domain provider is not obliged to check and control the their lawfulness.
The access provider is obliged to prevent accesibility of unlawful content, if and only if he is duly informed upon the provisions of the Law and he is technically capable of prevention. However, he is not obliged to control the lawfulness of the contents or to check whether these contents arise legal responsibility or not.
Prevention of access decision shall be given for the internet publishings whose contents arise significant doubts of certain crimes regulated by the Turkish Criminal Code, No. 5237, dated 26/9/2004; namely the solicitation of suicide (Article 84), sexual harassment of children (Article 103/1), facilitation of narcotic or exhilarant drug consumption (Article 190), supplying deleterious materials (Article 194), pornography (Article 226), prostitution (Article 227), providing opportunity and ground for gambling (Article 228) and the crimes regulated by Law on Crimes Offending Ataturk, No. 5816 and dated 25/7/1951.
In case of the non-performance of the access prevention decision, given as a administrative measure, the access provider shall be inflicted an administrative fine varying from 10.000 YTL to 100.000 YTL, by the Chairmanship of Telecommunication Insitution. In the event of non-payment of the inflicted fine within 24 hours, the authorization granted to the related provider shall be cancelled by the Institution, upon the request of the Chairmanship.
Any person claiming that his rights are violated by some content should apply first to the content provider and if he does not find any means to contact the content provider, then to the domain provider to demand the removal of the inlawful content and one-weekly publishing of his response, not to exceed the scope of the so-called inlawful content.
In case of a rejection of the abovementioned claims, the related person may apply to the magistrate court, claiming the removal of the violating content and one-weekly publishing of his response, not to exceed the scope of the so-called inlawful content.
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