Depends if they care about commercial or non-commercial stuff. Banning commercial use of software is fairly easy (tell the gatekeepers to disallow it, or at the very least to let the police find who did it); banning non-commercial isn’t strictly impossible, but I recon to be effective it would need governments to treat international internet connections like any other international border, and they are not prepared for the side-effects of doing that.
Most people don’t grok computers, so a commercial ban would probably cover most people, yet Bush-bin-Laden photoshop I saw back in the early noughties would still get made and shared.
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How effective could it be short of an international convention?
Reality is, unless most countries ban it, it's gonna be on the internet.
Depends if they care about commercial or non-commercial stuff. Banning commercial use of software is fairly easy (tell the gatekeepers to disallow it, or at the very least to let the police find who did it); banning non-commercial isn’t strictly impossible, but I recon to be effective it would need governments to treat international internet connections like any other international border, and they are not prepared for the side-effects of doing that.
Most people don’t grok computers, so a commercial ban would probably cover most people, yet Bush-bin-Laden photoshop I saw back in the early noughties would still get made and shared.