Additional Article 4 of Law No. 5846 sets a two-step procedure — a three-day demand on the content provider, then an application to the public prosecutor.
The Answer in Two Paragraphs
Türkiye does have copyright law, and it does have a statutory online takedown procedure — but the procedure is not in the internet law that foreign counsel usually reach for. It is in the third paragraph of Additional Article 4 of Law No. 5846 on Intellectual and Artistic Works (Fikir ve Sanat Eserleri Kanunu, FSEK). Where a service provider or a content provider infringes the rights of an author or a related rights holder by means transmitting signs, sound or images — digital transmission expressly included — the infringing works are removed from the content on the rights holder’s application. To get there, the rights holder must first apply to the content provider and demand that the infringement stop within three days. Only if the infringement continues does the second stage open: on an application to the public prosecutor, suspension of the service supplied to the persisting content provider is sought from the service provider, within three days.
The route under Law No. 5651, by contrast, is largely closed to a copyright complaint. Its general content-removal and access-blocking article, Article 9, has been annulled by the Constitutional Court, and the consolidated text of the Law now carries no operative wording under that article at all. What survives is Article 8/A, tied to a closed list of public-order grounds that does not include copyright, and Article 9/A, confined to the privacy of private life. A rights holder who understands that division of labour stops writing to the wrong authority and starts building the two files that actually work: the Additional Article 4 file, and the civil file.
The Two Routes Side by Side
| Feature | FSEK Additional Art. 4 (Law No. 5846) | Law No. 5651 blocking machinery |
|---|---|---|
| Ground | Infringement of an author's or related rights holder's rights recognised by Law No. 5846 | Art. 8/A: life, personal and property safety, national security and public order, prevention of crime, public health. Art. 9/A: privacy of private life |
| Who decides | Content provider first; then the public prosecutor on the rights holder's application | Judge, or the President of the authority in cases where delay is prejudicial, subject to judicial confirmation |
| Clock | Three days for the content provider to stop; three days for suspension of service at the second stage | Art. 8/A: execution immediately and within four hours; the order goes to a magistrate within twenty-four hours and the judge rules within forty-eight, failing which it lapses |
| Measure obtained | Removal of the infringing work from the content; suspension of the service supplied to the persisting content provider | Content removal and/or access blocking, as a rule per URL, with whole-site blocking only where URL blocking is technically impossible or ineffective |
| Reversibility | Written into the paragraph: service to the content provider is resumed once the infringement stops | Art. 8/A(2): the order lapses of itself if the judge does not rule in time |
| Use for copyright | The designated route | Not available on copyright grounds |
Working the Additional Article 4 Procedure
The paragraph is short, and each clause carries weight. The words “the natural or legal person whose rights are prejudiced first applies to the content provider” put the burden of the opening move on the rights holder and make the three-day demand a step rather than a courtesy. The demand should be capable of standing on its own as an exhibit later: it should identify the work, state the basis on which the sender holds the economic rights in issue, give the precise addresses at which the material appears, and record the three-day period. Sending it in a form that produces proof of service — registered electronic mail (KEP) to a Turkish addressee, or a notary’s notice — is what converts a complaint into evidence.
Two obligations in the same paragraph give the procedure teeth that are easy to overlook. Service providers must notify the Ministry, on the first business day of each month, of a list showing the names of their content providers; and both service providers and content providers must supply any information and document requested by the Ministry. The closing sentence of the paragraph directs that the principles and procedures for its application be laid down in a regulation to be issued by the Ministry.
Note what Additional Article 4 is not. Its first paragraph is a different rule altogether: it prohibits the unauthorised removal or alteration of rights-management information carried on copies of a work or visible when the work is presented to the public, and prohibits the distribution, importation for distribution, publication, or communication to the public of originals or copies whose rights-management information has been tampered with. The second paragraph extends that prohibition to phonograms and to performances fixed in phonograms. Neither paragraph is a takedown mechanism, and citing them as one is a familiar drafting error.
Why the Blocking Law Does Not Fill the Gap
The structure of Law No. 5651 explains the gap precisely. Article 5(1) states that a host provider is under no duty to check the content it hosts or to investigate whether unlawful activity is present — there is no general monitoring obligation. Article 5(2) then creates the removal duty, but ties it to a specific trigger: the host provider must remove unlawful content when it is notified “in accordance with Articles 8 and 9 of this Law”. With Article 9 annulled, that trigger no longer reaches ordinary private-law complaints, and a copyright notice does not by itself engage the statutory duty in Article 5(2).
Article 8/A is not a substitute. Its first paragraph opens with an exhaustive list of grounds, and copyright appears nowhere in it. Its third paragraph is worth reading closely for a different reason: blocking orders are to be made per URL, but the sentence continues — “however, where it is technically impossible to block access to the infringing content, or where the infringement cannot be prevented by blocking access to that content, a decision to block access to the entire website may be given.” That reservation is what makes whole-site blocking lawful in the narrow cases where it happens; it is not a general licence, and it does not extend the grounds.
Article 9/A operates on a still narrower footing. It is available to a person alleging that the privacy of their private life has been violated, requires the full URL and an explanation of how the right was violated, and carries its own timetable: access providers execute within four hours at the latest, the applicant must put the request before a magistrate within twenty-four hours, and the judge announces a decision within forty-eight hours — “failing which, the access-blocking measure lapses of itself.” A copyright owner cannot dress an infringement complaint as a privacy complaint to reach that timetable.
The one place where Law No. 5651 helps a rights holder is procedural rather than substantive. Additional Article 4 of that Law requires a foreign-sourced social network provider with more than one million daily accesses from Türkiye to designate at least one authorised person as a representative in Türkiye and to publish that person’s contact details in an easily visible and directly accessible way on its website; above ten million daily accesses the designated representative must be fully empowered in technical, administrative, legal and financial terms, and, if a legal person, a branch established as a capital company by the social network provider itself. That gives a rights holder a Turkish address to serve. It does not give copyright a new remedy: the forty-eight-hour response obligation in the third paragraph of that article is expressly tied to content within the scope of Articles 9 and 9/A. Amendments to the article adopted in April 2026 enter into force on 1 November 2026 and have not yet been written into the consolidated text.
The Civil Track Does the Heavy Lifting
For anything beyond removing a handful of files, the civil court is where the outcome is decided, and Law No. 5846 gives a rights holder an unusually well-stocked toolbox. Article 66 allows an action for the cessation of infringement, permits it to be brought against the proprietor of a business where the infringement was committed by its representatives or employees in the course of their duties, and states plainly that fault on the part of the infringer is not a condition. It also allows the author to bring the cessation and prevention actions at their own place of residence. Article 69 extends the same protection forward, to the risk of an infringement not yet committed and to cases where continuation or repetition appears likely.
Article 77 supplies the interim relief. Where it is necessary to prevent substantial harm, imminent danger, or a fait accompli, and the assertions made are strongly probable, the civil court may — before or after the action is filed — order the other party to do or refrain from doing something, order the closing or opening of the place where the activity is carried on, and order that reproduced copies of a work, or the moulds and similar means used exclusively to produce them, be placed under protective custody. The order must state that non-compliance carries the criminal consequences of Article 343 of the Execution and Bankruptcy Law. Where infringing copies cross the border, the second paragraph applies Article 57 of Customs Law No. 4458.
Money follows under Article 68: a rights holder whose permission was not obtained may claim up to three times the fee it could have demanded had a contract been made, or the current market fee determined under the Law. The ceiling wording matters — “up to three times” is a maximum, not an automatic multiplier, and the court fixes the base fee. Under Article 70, moral damages are separately available, and compensation for economic rights follows the general tort provisions, which means fault must be shown there. If the rights holder also claims the profit obtained, the amount claimed under Article 68 is deducted. Jurisdiction, since the 2016 amendment, is the courts designated in the first paragraph of Article 156 of Industrial Property Law No. 6769 — the intellectual and industrial property civil and criminal courts, with the general civil and criminal courts of first instance standing in where none has been established. That same court structure carries the wider IP docket — though not all of it any longer: our note on the administrative cancellation regime in industrial property sets out how trademark revocation was moved out of those courts and into TÜRKPATENT.
Copyright and Trademark Compared
A rights holder policing an online marketplace often has both a copyright and a trademark case, and the two behave differently at the threshold.
| Question | Copyright (Law No. 5846) | Trademark (Law No. 6769) |
|---|---|---|
| Registration needed? | No — protection arises on creation; recordal is evidential | Yes for the criminal offence: Art. 30(5) requires the mark to be registered in Türkiye |
| Criminal exposure | Art. 71(1): one to five years' imprisonment or a judicial fine; a separate paragraph gives three months to two years for content providers continuing to infringe | Art. 30(1): one to three years' imprisonment and a judicial fine of up to twenty thousand days |
| Complaint-dependent? | Yes — Art. 75, with documents proving the right filed with the prosecutor | Yes — Art. 30(6) |
| Interim relief provision | Art. 77 of Law No. 5846 | Art. 159 of Law No. 6769, on proof that infringement is occurring in the country or that serious and effective preparations are being made |
| Statutory online takedown | Additional Art. 4, third paragraph | No equivalent in Law No. 6769; the e-commerce notice regime is used instead |
The Criminal File and Its Precondition
Article 75 of Law No. 5846 is where otherwise sound complaints fail. Investigation and prosecution of the offences in Articles 71 and 72 depend on complaint — and the sentence immediately following sets a documentary condition: for the complaint to be treated as valid, the rights holders or the collecting societies of which they are members must submit to the public prosecutor’s office the documents and other evidence proving their rights. If those are not submitted within the complaint period, a decision of no grounds for prosecution is given. The chain of title therefore has to be assembled before the complaint is filed, not after it. For commissioned or employee-created works, and for software in particular, that chain is exactly the material discussed in our note on source code ownership and IP assignment.
The same article gives the prosecutor two tools. Seizure of the property that is the subject matter of the offence proceeds under the Code of Criminal Procedure. Separately, the prosecutor may, if it is considered necessary, order the suspension of activity limited to the reproduction of works alleged to have been reproduced unlawfully — but the following sentence controls it: that order is submitted to a judge within twenty-four hours, and an order not confirmed by the judge within twenty-four hours becomes void. A rights holder relying on such an order should track the confirmation, not just the order.
Article 71 also carries the criminal counterpart of the takedown procedure. Those who commit the acts described in the first paragraph of Additional Article 4 without authority, and content providers that continue to infringe rights recognised by the Law, face three months to two years’ imprisonment where the conduct does not constitute an offence attracting a heavier penalty. That is the sanction standing behind the three-day demand, and it is one reason the demand should be documented as carefully as a pleading.
Sequencing a Real Complaint
The order of operations tends to decide the outcome. Preserve the evidence first — timestamped captures of every address, the file itself where it can lawfully be obtained, and the hosting and registrar records. Assemble the chain of title next, because both the prosecutor’s file under Article 75 and the strong-probability test in Article 77 turn on it. Then send the three-day demand under Additional Article 4 and diarise the deadline. If the material comes down, the file is complete and inexpensive. If it does not, the prosecutor’s application and the civil action are prepared in parallel rather than in sequence, because the interim relief in Article 77 is available before the action is filed and is usually the measure that stops the commercial bleeding. Where the infringement is systematic rather than incidental, the ongoing work is better handled as a programme than as a series of one-off notices, which is how our copyright and anti-piracy and broader intellectual property work is organised.
One caution on figures. The administrative fines set out in Law No. 5651 — including the range applicable to host providers that fail to meet their obligations, and the escalating penalties in its Additional Article 4 — are the nominal amounts in the enacted text. They are revalued annually, so the figure that applies to a given year should be taken from the relevant annual communiqué rather than from the statute as printed.
