What do these statutes actually address?
A description of the legal position, written so it can be checked against the instruments themselves. It is not advice, and it cannot be: the answer turns on where you are and on what left your device.
The two absolutes
Generating, publishing, transmitting
Outside those two categories the statutes are mostly concerned with what leaves a device. Publication, sale, distribution and transmission are the acts named; private generation usually is not addressed at all. The consequence is that operators carry far more exposure than their customers, and that platform rules are tighter than any single country's law.
The four markets
| Market | Instrument | What it reaches |
|---|---|---|
| United States | State statutes, federal obscenity law, and the 2025 federal act on intimate imagery | Publication of non-consensual material; obscenity standards vary by state |
| South Korea | Criminal Act, arts. 243–244 | Distribution, sale and display; services blocked at the network level |
| 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 applies separately to some readers |
The line is distribution, with two exceptions
For most readers the practical rule is simple: what you generate privately sits outside what these statutes name, what you publish does not, and the two absolute categories have no version that is acceptable anywhere. Everything else is a platform policy question rather than a criminal one.
Questions
- Is generating this material privately an offence?
- In most of the markets covered here, no — the statutes address publication, distribution and transmission. Two categories are exceptions with no private-use carve-out anywhere: material depicting minors, and sexual material made from an identifiable real person without consent.
- Why are these sites blocked in some countries if using them is not an offence?
- Because blocking is an administrative measure aimed at the service, not a finding about the reader. A regulator lists a domain and intermediaries are directed to drop it. That is why a market can simultaneously have no provision covering private generation and almost no reachable services.
- Does a platform's content policy track the law?
- It tracks the strictest market the platform operates in, plus its payment processor's rules, which are stricter again. That is why platform policies routinely forbid things no single jurisdiction forbids.