Existing generative products have until 2 December on marking
Providers whose synthetic-media systems were on the market before 2 August have four more months to implement machine-readable marking. Everything else in Article 50 applied immediately. That gap is a build schedule, and it is short.
Four months to retrofit provenance into a shipped product is not generous. The work involves the generation pipeline, the output encoding, the storage format and whatever downstream processing the product performs, and none of it was designed with a marking layer in mind.
The practical consequence is that most synthetic media in circulation right now carries no machine-readable mark at all, and will not until well into next year. Any detection tooling deployed before then is looking for something that is largely absent.
It also creates a two-tier situation that will persist for years. Content generated before the deadline is unmarked and indistinguishable, permanently. The regime marks the future and can do nothing about the archive.
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