This began as my answer to Matt’s blog update for blocking WordPress.com in Turkey; since it it became too large, I’ll post it here. As long as the sites in question do not violate your „Terms of Service“ and USA juristiction regulating WordPress.com host – let them be. But if they are infringing your rules – remove them. If the 17 emails were not digitally signed by the atorneys, who claim to represent Mr. Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya) – then in legal parlance you were not contacted officially. On the other hand, you already know some facts (despite the lack of official correspondence), and maybe you have to react according to local laws. Also, you do not have to worry about Turkish law – it has nothing to do with WordPress.com. It is not your problem. It is their problem. Nellyo reminded (in bulgarian language, a media law expert)

„Turkish law decision itself does not obligate WordPress.com to do anything. Turkey seeks EU membership and restricting standarts on free speech (freedom of expresison) have to be similar to European ones. …
Blocking the whole hosted content on WordPres.com is unproportional measure and highly ineffective – European Court of Human Rights always seeks proportion (limit) in restrictions, even when they are „needed in a democratic society.“

Turkey has full signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. You may officially contact them and the Republic of Turkey to lift the unappropriate and illegal block. There is a lot of really high quality, usefull, good and interesting content hosted on WordPress.com, and it is awfull that it is unavailable in Turkey.

Turkish penal code, art. 301: „Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime“. And if the contetn on WordPress.com did not offend Turkishness, their court has no right to ask domain blocking.

Edip Yuksel wrote in a comment – here (the last one so far) – that he is not using WordPress.com host – others claim his name and articles in order to attract attention; to struggle with abuse and suppession they suffer in Turkey, perhaps overusing WordPress platform. If he does not officially want the sites removed, there is no problem.

Turkish law system is not prepared to handle accordingly the modern ways people communicate and express themselves – not only blogs and online journalism, the whole Internet is like a black hole to their government. They need to reorganise it quickly, or be blamed like China and Russia. If they fail – no European membership for them in 2013. I feel sorry for open-minded, creative, intelligent, educated, modern turks.

So, what’s next? First of all – how to bypass major ISP block. A simple web search will display numerous ways to do that, proxies, online and offline means, some are easy to implement, others need more technical competence, etc. As far as I know, in Turkey it is not hard to do it – not yet ;). It is not so illegal and is hard to prove (at least the sofisticated methods) :).

Then spread the word – through direct publicism, paper journalism, a lot of possibilities in the modern world. No need to be rude or flaming or abusive – just be patient, passionate, sincere, honest – and do not breach your own laws and the laws of your host, while doing that.

Or maybe tomorrow they will block Yahoo!, MSN, Google, YouTube, Windows Live, Myspace, Wikipedia, Blogger.com, Megaupload, Microsoft, Fotolog.com, EBay, Mail.ru, Amazon.com, IMDB, Flickr, Photobucket.com, ImageShack, Go.com, AOL, Geocities, Adobe, Apple.com, CNN, ICQ and even Assenoff– the worst scenario (insert random smiley here)!

To finish in a positive manner – let’s hope Turkey’s court and administration revise their decision and prove readyness for supplying basic democratic freedoms.

However, I’ll advice Matt to ask for more detailed and official legal advice – :). Sorry for my not so fluent English.