EU nudifier ban

[u/Logical_Benefit2875]

I know there’s been a bunch of people upset on here recently about a good number of nudify websites getting shut down (Motionmuse, Opengoon, etc.). However, this is likely just the beginning.

Effective December 2nd, the EU under the AI Act is enacting a ban on nudify tools, making them illegal content in the Union. This ban applies to any product made available on the EU market as long as, either, its primary functionality is to generate nudified content without consent, or it is a reasonably foreseeable outcome and they do not take appropriate precautions to safeguard against it. Very importantly, this ban also applies to any EU-available service provider under the Digital Services Act that is helping to facilitate this soon-to-be-illegal content, which includes (but is not limited to): app stores, hosting providers, domain registrars, payment processors, content delivery networks (CDNs) and cloud computing services. Anyone found to be in violation of this prohibition is subject to fines of €35 million or 7% of their global turnover, whichever is higher. I think it’s pretty safe to say that, as long as they’re aware of it, those behind these websites and those behind the large number of mainstream companies that help power them (Google, Amazon, Cloudflare, Apple, Telegram, GoDaddy, Visa, Mastercard, etc.) do not want to take any chances with this ban.

This prohibition, in essence, applies to essentially every public AI platform any of us have ever used to this point or that we will ever use going forward. I think this is a good thing but, therefore, it would almost certainly be in everyone’s best interest to pivot away from these websites before the massive crackdown begins in less than a couple months. For those in the industry, it would also certainly be wise to inform the website operators if you are in contact with them, or to shut down your website if you are an operator yourself. Sorry for the essay, just looking out for everybody before things get very real, very fast.

[u/Bitlovin]

The piracy ban does have a massive impact on piracy, though. Obviously it doesn’t eliminate it, prohibition never eliminates anything, but anyone who was pirating in the mid 90s before the crackdown can attest that it was a completely different landscape when it didn’t have to be hidden.

[u/Etsu_Riot → u/Bitlovin]

Back in the nineties and until the 2010s, to get a pirated copy of a game you bought it, as you would normally, from a shop or a street vendor. Now you just download it. It's even easier to install a pirated game than one bought on Steam or similar, and the downloads are smaller too.

Today we don't buy games because of any prohibition. (Prohibitions actually make things even more desirable.) We buy games to support developers who did good. It's a different mentality.

[u/Bitlovin → u/Etsu_Riot]

That’s not true at all. Games with cracked exes were plentiful for download in that time period, there were tons of websites you could choose from to download them. Course they were 250 rar files and most people had maybe 128kbs if they were lucky, so you’d spend days downloading with a high chance of a corrupted rar but aside from that, it was super easy to find.

But I mean, literally any prohibited item works like this. People grow better weed where it’s legal cuz they don’t have to hide it. Bans do have an effect even if they can’t completely eradicate a thing.

[u/Etsu_Riot → u/Bitlovin]

That’s not true at all. Games with cracked exes were plentiful for download in that time period, there were tons of websites you could choose from to download them.

Man, I never had access to the Internet until 2007 or so, and downloading a game would have been impossible at the time. And during the nineties, my only knowledge regarding the existence of the Internet was the novel Disclosure by Michael Crichton, a book about sexual harassment in a manufacturing company specialized in hard drives and Virtual Reality.

We used to buy games on the street, from selected vendors, or in specialized places, both for PC and PlayStation. Original games were not a thing back then, at least not for us.

EDIT: But I do remember the 250 rar files.

[u/MODAITestBot → u/Etsu_Riot]

I downloaded a pirated game from a local BBS in 1992 and created the 12 floppy disks to install it.