Skip to content
spicyai-hub 18+

Where the law sits

A summary of what the statutes in this area actually address, written so it can be checked. It is not legal advice and it cannot be: the position turns on where you are and what you did with the file.

The two lines that are absolute

Generating, publishing, transmitting

Outside those two categories, the statutes are mostly about what leaves your device. Publication, distribution, transmission and sale are the acts named; private generation is usually not addressed at all. That distinction explains why a market can simultaneously block every site in this category and have no provision covering a person generating something privately.

It also explains why operators in this category are more exposed than their users, and why platform policies are often stricter than local law. An operator must satisfy payment processors, hosts and several regulators at once; the strictest of those sets the rules you will actually encounter.

The four markets in this catalogue

What is addressed, per market. Links go to the statute.
MarketInstrumentWhat it addresses
United States State statutes, federal obscenity law Varies by state; non-consensual synthetic imagery criminalised in most
South Korea Criminal Act, arts. 243–244 Distribution, sale and display of obscene material; sites blocked at the ISP
India IT Act 2000, s. 67 Publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form
Malaysia CMA 1998, s. 233 Distribution of obscene content; state Sharia law may apply separately

Each language branch repeats the relevant notice in its own language: 한국어, Bahasa Melayu, India.

Questions about the legal position

Does generating something privately carry the same risk as sharing it?
Almost never the same, and the gap is the single most useful thing to understand here. Most statutes in this area attack distribution, publication or transmission. Two categories are exceptions and are treated as offences regardless of whether anything was shared: material depicting minors, and sexual material made from an identifiable person without consent.
What changed recently?
Non-consensual synthetic sexual imagery moved from a civil matter to a criminal one across much of the English-speaking world and in South Korea, and platform-level age assurance became a legal requirement in several jurisdictions rather than a policy choice. Both changes affect which tools can operate rather than what a private user may generate.
Is a VPN a solution to a blocked site?
It is a way around a network block, not a change in legal position. Where distribution of this material is an offence, routing around an ISP does not alter that, and in some jurisdictions circumvention is itself addressed. This page states where the law sits; it is not advice about getting past it.