As President he met with all the major world leaders but Gül also likes to keep in touch with the public, for which he started to use Twitter a while ago. Gül, who has a verified account on Twitter, occasionally tweets his thoughts about national and international politics, and also shares more personal stuff from time to time.

One tweet in particular caught the attention of many of his 185,000+ followers yesterday. Before wishing everyone a good weekend, Gül mentioned how he enjoyed watching “The King’s Speech” at home with his wife the other day.

“Watched The King’s Speech at home with my wife the other day. Really a very beautiful movie,’ he tweeted.

The Turkish President is not the only one who enjoyed the film of course. With twelve Oscar nominations it is considered to be one of the best movies of 2010 by many people.

However, the tweet nevertheless resulted in a small uproar among his followers. The big question is how he could have possibly watched the film at home, without breaking copyright law.

The King’s Speech is not available on DVD anywhere in the world, and the film has not even premiered in Turkish movie theaters yet. There is, however, a good copy of the film available on BitTorrent, Usenet and various other file-sharing platforms (and on the streets).

This led many of his Twitter followers to conclude that their President is in fact a movie pirate. How else would it be possible for him to watch the movie at his home in Turkey?

In a response to the tweet many people asked Gül where he downloaded the movie, and whether he prefers Usenet or BitTorrent. Thus far, the President has not replied to the inquiries, but if he does we will add the response here.

Perhaps Gül can do something about the Turkish Pirate Bay block now? I assume many of his followers would also like to grab a copy of The King’s Speech following this shining presidential endorsement.

Update: Without going into detail Gül said in a response “an illegal film would not be given to me.” Perhaps his staff managed to get a super-exclusive deal to show a private screening to the President? We’d love to hear more about it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

If it’s any consolation, The Pirate Bay is not alone in being blocked. In March, YouTube was banned for hosting videos that insulted the founder of modern Turkey. To the relief of many Turks, the ban only lasted two days, as Google promptly pulled down the videos. And last month, WordPress.com was blocked because some of its users were charged with defamation of a Turkish author.

The first we heard of the Pirate Bay block was two days ago, when Cenk, a long-time reader of TorrentFreak from Turkey, e-mailed in to let us know that The Pirate Bay was no longer accessible in his country. Cenk states that since last Monday, government has shut down all access to thepiratebay.org. However, the press has said nothing on the matter. “I did not hear about thepiratebay.org getting sued or anything and even there was no news on the newspaper or anywhere,” he wrote.

We asked the TPB guys if they knew anything about this. According to them, it has been blocked “for over a year.” They’re “not sure if it’s the whole country or just the major ISPs,” but “there was some court ruling over it.” That court ruling, we’ve discovered, has ordered Türk Telekom, Turkey’s largest ISP, to block The Pirate Bay, though why exactly is still unknown to both the site’s admins and users of the site in Turkey.

There is a comical irony to this all, given that Turkey is the home of some of the most famous real life pirates history has seen, those of the Barbary coast. One can only guess that they have yet to set sail in the intertubes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.