Bülent Forta, the president of MÜYAP, defends himself here (in Turkish). He has become the main target of protesters against the MySpace and LastFm ban. He says they did not intend the ban itself but protect musicians’ rights. His was a “struggle for rights”. In fact, Mr. Forta is known to be decades-long leftist activist. It is another life irony that his constant quest to struggle for rights based on his leftist convictions lead to serve for Music Business. In fact, many former leftist activists followed the same path in Turkey…. Besides, like the Turkish Judiciary, many Turkish politicians and some Business, Mr. Forta may not have realized the nature of Web 2.0 (This is wishful thinking in fact, because Mr. Forta boasted about how stopped many other websites before; thus he seemed to have known where his move was leading to…)
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A comment by a friend of my:
I can guess on one hand that the Turkish Union of Music Producers is worried about the illegal delivery of copy-protected Turkish songs on Myspace and LastFm. Many pages of Turkish amateur musicians are containing somebody else’s songs without any rights for those, because it just doesn’t seem to get understood in Turkey that according to international copyright laws one cannot even make one’s own version of a song composed by someone else and put it to Myspace without asking for permission. It gets even more complicated by the fact that there are also many songs where melodies are pretty much “borrowed”.
On the other hand, this is hypocratic bullshit. Turkey is one of the biggest pirate-product producer and re-seller; and this relates to both Turkish and foreign films, music, software and clothes. On every corner there are illegal DVD/CD shops and many small computer shops sell illegal software…not to mention those fake Adidas and Nike products sold everywhere. The law is banning this, but one can see often even policemen standing next to the pirate product seller and doing nothing. To me it seems like the existence of the huge pirate product markets is just accepted as “necessary income for poor people”.
The Turkish Union of Music Producers should perhaps first pay attention to the situation inside the country, before starting banning their own citizens from acessing global websites. I’m pretty sure that many members of the Union themselves consume pirate products, such as illegally downloaded or copied foreign music albums. Crying after lost money of Turkish musicians is chicken’s shit compared to the misuse of global branches and artists.