The Ministry of Justice on Wednesday unveiled proposed amendments to privacy laws targeting creators of deepfake and “revenge” pornography with sentences of seven and five years in prison respectively.
The proposals are in response to the arrest last month of Taiwanese YouTuber Chu Yu-chen (朱玉宸), who is suspected of creating and selling pornographic videos that were digitally altered to include the likenesses of famous politicians.
The drafts have been forwarded to the Executive Yuan for review before they are sent to the legislature for approval, Minister of Justice Tsai Ching-hsiang (蔡清祥) said.
While the proposal dealing with “revenge porn” has been in the works since March, the provisions dealing with pornography using another person’s likeness without their consent were drafted in response to demand from the legislature, he said.
The bill would shore up privacy protections under Chapter 28 of the Criminal Code, the ministry’s head prosecutor Lin Ying-tzu (林映姿) said, adding that the chapter is to be renamed from “offenses against privacy” to “offenses against privacy and sexual privacy.”
The proposal stipulates that manufacturing and distributing falsified sexual recordings for commercial purpose — which includes deepfakes — is punishable by a sentence of up to seven years in prison, she said.
Creating illegal deepfake pornography for private use and distribution would be considered a lesser crime subject to a prison sentence of up to five years, she said.
The creation of nonsexual deepfakes that falsify the action, speech or conversation of a person carries a penalty of up to three years in prison, while committing the offense with a commercial motive is punishable by five years in prison, she added.
While the bill also covers deepfakes created for political purpose, the ministry is considering an amendment to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) that would explicitly outlaw the use of deepfakes for electoral gain, Lin said.
The amendments would not ban computer-generated imagery and effects utilized in the film industry or other benign uses of synthetic media, she said.
“The legal standard is whether a manufactured image or video might pose material harm to the public or personal interest,” she added.
The proposed amendments would address digital voyeurism and revenge porn by punishing the crime under its own legal category, she said.
The law currently treats recording intimate videos without consent no differently than unauthorized recordings of a nonsexual nature, which carries a sentence of no more than three years in prison, Lin said.
That penalty is insufficient to deal with infringements on sexual privacy enabled by camera-equipped cellphones and other Internet-connected devices, she said.
The amendment stipulates that creating an unauthorized recording of a sexual nature is a separate and more severe offense punishable by a sentence of up to four years and six months in prison, she said.
Making unauthorized recordings of sex with intent to commercially distribute them carries an increased sentence of up to five years in prison, while simply distributing an intimate recording without consent carries a prison sentence of no more than two years, she said.
Additional reporting by CNA
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